“Initiating spiral scanning,” her voice repeated, her tone silky, like honey.
It was strange. We were going to through hell, and we definitely sounded like it. Meanwhile, Annabelle was programmed to keep her composure up to and during the possibility of her dismantling. It was just another reason the suits were better than us. When we freaked out, they didn’t.
“Take a hard left here, Lieutenant Ryder. Follow that line thirty-five yards, and you’ll be outside of the brunt of the nanite cloud.”
I did as she said and, like a miracle in front of me, her words came true.
The cloud dissipated. The moon stretched out in front of me in an expanse of various reds and golds, the world tinted from my still accessed thermal vision.
“Revert to basic vision tendencies,” I said. My thermal vision overlay receded, revealing a large desert world with caves and caverns along various mountains of red, dry looking rock. I didn’t see any more bugs offhand, but I was intent on keeping my eyes peeled. There was no need to get snuck up on again.
“Initiating biochemical and foreign body purge,” Annabelle said, and a soft hum started in my suit. It was expelling the chlorine and nanites, which meant that when it was done I’d actually be able to talk to the Alliance and the other teams here for a change. “Estimated time of completion: thirty-seven point six seconds.”
“Good,” I muttered, shrugging Billy off me.
“Thank God,” he said and took a deep breath as though his suit hadn’t been filtering out the chemicals this whole damned time. He looked over at me. “Thank you.”
“Don’t do that either. Don’t thank me for doing my job.” I shook my head. “Because, trust me, when the time comes, I won’t be thanking you for it. I’ll expect you to do it anyway though.”
“Yes sir,” he said, nodding. “I mean, okay, Mark.”
Relief filled me. The other one might have been dead, but Billy was okay, and so was I. That counted for something, even if we weren’t even close to finished with this mission.
“How are you?” I asked, looking him over.
“A little sore, but I think I’m fine.”
“That’s cute, but I wasn’t asking you for your damn interests and horoscope. Run a diagnostic check and tell me if you can still fight.”
“Okay,” he said, blinking.
Again, I was being a dick, but it was for his own good. Better he hardened up now. It would save him a lot of trouble if he lived.
“I’m okay,” he answered. “Broken rib, and a bruised eye socket, but he says I can keep going.”
“Okay,” I answered, feeling a pang of sympathy I couldn’t afford to nurture. “Let’s just try to ge—”
“Lieutenant Ryder,” Della’s voice chimed through my comms system. Annabelle must have finished the purge and restored communication, a hypothesis reinforced by the sudden digital sound effect of coins falling as my kills were updated to the Alliance database.
“I’m here,” I answered over the pointless din.
“What’s your status?” Della asked.
“Lost one, kept the other. Billy Langham is still alive,” I reported. “No thanks to you guys. This was a damn trap, Della. You mean to tell me you people couldn’t see it coming? Isn’t that what they pay you for?”
“We don’t have time for your lip right now. Only one other triad managed to survive the landing. Your band is being updated with their coordinates, and a navigational through line is being downloaded to your suits as we speak. Get to the Artemis squad, Ryder. And do it quickly. Those girls are in trouble.”
8
I had never been the kind of person who took the term ‘legend’ very seriously. It’s kind of hard to do when the word encompasses you too. In the past, more people than I could count had used that word to describe me. They had walked up to me, hands wringing and jaw clenched tight with nerves, telling me how much the stories of what I had done meant to them growing up. They would tell me how their mothers would tuck them into bed at night, recounting all the amazing things I had done and how fearless I had been in the face of the bugs.
My reactions would vary.
While I had never been the kind of person to get a big head about crap I had no control over, I used to be more gracious when it came to ‘admirers.’ I would nod and tell them how humbled I was to have been a part of their routine. I would thank them for coming up to, and if they were fellow Marines, I would suggest we go out for coffee in some phantom future that would never actually happen.
All of that faded away over the years though. The truth is, when you stand there and watch the shit hit the fan time after time, the last thing you want to do is listen to some punk kid with no idea of how the world really works tell you how awesome the fan is.
The fan is not awesome. The fan is covered in shit, and so was I. I wasn’t fearless. Only fools are fearless, and half the stories those idiots’ mothers told them were either embellished or completely made up. Anybody can be a hero when you’re pulling it out of your ass.
The truth was, I wasn’t better than anyone else. I wasn’t smarter or stronger. The secret to my success came down to two simple and undeniable facts. I was luckier than most, and I was a hell of a lot more cautious than most.
I couldn’t teach the first one. Luck is an intangible thing that can neither be bought nor properly defined. I was whatever I needed to be whenever I needed it. That was as close as I could come. The second part though, the really important part, you could teach that, and I was under the impression that the Alliance should.
“Prepare for the worst and nine times out of ten, you won’t be wrong.” Carver James told me that, that brilliant son of a bitch, and it was the greatest lesson I ever had the privilege of learning. Every step was a landmine. Every corner was one that the enemy was hiding behind. Every bug was the one that was finally going to kill you. Live like that, and you’re never surprised. Train like that, and the world can’t sneak up on you.
If that was what made me a legend, I had a very specific man to thank for it, and I assumed that the woman whose name came across my band right now felt much the same way.
“Mina John?” Billy muttered. I could practically hear him popping wood.
“Don’t go fanboy on me, Langham. We’ve got work to do, and that doesn’t involve you drooling at the mouth or spraying your pants at the thought of your childhood crush.”
He looked at me, straightening himself up and clearing his throat. “Yes, Mark,” he said in a tone that was meant to make him sound like a man but just served to further prove how far he had left to go down that particular road.
I held back a smile, not because I was happy about anything per se, but because, whether I cared to admit it or not, I understood what made the kid so impressed.
Everyone who had heard my name had probably also heard the name Mina John. If I was a legend in my own time, then she was as well. Sure, she hadn’t braved as many missions as me, and she didn’t have as many wins. That was verifiable fact with those stupid leaderboards the Alliance pushed out constantly.
She was damned close though, closer than anyone else in the Marines. A woman after my own heart, she had also forgone the traditional route of moving up into management, remaining a Lieutenant like myself.
I wondered if, like me, she faced pressure to move on too. While the both of us were legends, the sort of stuff movies are made of and books were written about, to say we were particularly wanted out here was an overstatement.
Well, that wasn’t necessarily true. The marines, ninety percent of whom were younger than us, adored the idea of having us out here, still in the field. I had even heard tales of raffles being held with the intent of giving away a spot on my squad. That wouldn’t work, of course. While the Alliance was definitely money hungry, selling squads and the way they were made up flew directly in the face of the constitution. The Alliance might have had brass balls, but they weren’t big enough to do that. One whiff of that sort of impropriety would
send the protesters into a frenzy the likes of which couldn’t be ignored.
Besides, the higher ups squarely didn’t like the idea of us being here. We were old. Nor old for the world, or anything. At thirty-four, I was in the prime of my life, and Mina looked to be even younger than me.
We were definitely seasoned though, having outlasted all the people we’d come up with. That made us dinosaurs and it also made us tricky to deal with. We were heroes and, more than that, we were stories. But stories had endings and the Alliance wanted control of those endings.
The people of Earth loved me. They loved Mina too. They looked up to both of us and that meant they didn’t want to see us die the kind of horrible death we almost certainly would should we continue on this path.
Soldiers died, but heroes didn’t have to. The news of us getting killed by the bugs would undoubtedly deal a horrible blow to Earth morale.
To that end, I had been offered many promotions, many cushy jobs and a lot of money to perform them. I had to imagine Mina had received the same options.
I turned all of them down. I had to imagine she had as well.
While I had never spoken to her or even seen her outside of the recruitment posters her image graces back on Earth, part of me thought I must have understood her in a way a lot of people didn’t. We’d had similar experiences, she and I. We were both big deals who probably couldn’t pay the rent if not for odd jobs and the like. I had to imagine she had gotten trapped in the same credit loop as I did when the Alliance changed the system. I also had to think she wasn’t afraid of spending a little bit of coin to keep herself safe.
I had seen the posters more than once and, while a hell of a lot of the Marines in my barracks were looking at her suit and imagining what was underneath it, I was staring at the obvious upgrades. Photon blasters, world-class shielding, and a battle axe that would have made Genghis Khan shudder with jealousy; that suit was a thing of beauty. Then again, so was she.
“You think Artemis squad is—”
“All women?” I asked, walking beside Billy and cutting him off. “Of course, it’s all women. Didn’t you hear the Major? She said those girls are in trouble.”
Even if she hadn’t though, it was common knowledge Mina John only worked with women. Normally, that wouldn’t be tenable. For the most part, the Alliance doesn’t give two shits about who you want to team with or what you feel like your personal limitations are when it comes to teammates. You get who you get and, if you’re smart, you’ll shut the hell up about it.
Mina was a special case though. Her status and record were enough to afford her some slack. It was unofficial, of course, but the Alliance must have felt like she’d earned it. I could have gotten the same thing too, I guess. I didn’t care though. Men or women, I’d work with them all.
As Della had said, the navigational through line which would lead us to Mina and the women of Artemis downloaded into our suits quickly. I watched as it splayed out in my vision, pumped into my head by the tubing sticking into my brainstem.
“There we go,” I said. “You see it?”
“I see it,” Billy said, wonderment in his voice. He must have been more than a little taken aback because he reached out with his hands as though he could actually touch the glowing red line that had appeared in our lines of sight. It wasn’t really there, just an illusion produced by electrical impulses in his cerebral cortex, but it would stay there until we reached our destination.
I shook my head. Where did they get these grassfeds, anyway?
“Annabelle. Patch me into Artemis. I want to tell them help is on the way.”
“One moment, Lieutenant Ryder,” she answered. She was silent for a second or two before continuing, “I’m afraid attempts to contact have gone unanswered.”
Damn. They must be too busy to answer. In a place like this, that wasn’t good. “Fine. Give me an ETA.”
“Given the current climate and natural conditions, your estimated time of arrival, barring attack by Acburian or other unforeseen threats, is four hundred and thirty-six seconds.”
“A little over seven minutes,” I muttered, nudging Billy. “Let’s go. That’s more time than I’m comfortable with.”
“You think they’ll be okay?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I admitted. “We just have to move fast and smart. Let’s hope we don’t run into much trouble out here, and let’s hope Mina John is as impressive as the stories say she is.”
I hoped she was. Hell, I even thought she might be but as I moved forward along the holographic red line, all I could think of was a shit covered fan.
9
I followed the red line displayed on my HUD with Billy walking behind me. Every so often, I’d ask Annabelle to run periodic vicinity checks to ensure the bugs didn’t sneak up on us, though she’d have done it, anyway. Guess I’m just hard headed that way.
The moon was a desert filled with sand and stone, not unlike the deserts back home on Earth. The star that lit this moon though was further away than the sun was from Earth, and because of that, this place froze over at night. Scientists back home used to theorize that that was part of the reason why the bugs had developed such thick exoskeletons. Millennia of evolution had awarded them a natural way to brave the cold, harsh terrain of a planet that, like its moon, was far enough away from its heat source to prove perilous.
That idea always struck me as a strange and a little unfair. Plus, it made me look at my own species like a bunch of candy ass spoiled brats. There we were, on a planet that made things relatively easy for us. Food was plentiful in most parts of it, and the temperatures were only ever a problem for people who were stupid enough to try to climb mountains or skydive near volcanoes.
I chuckled to myself, relishing in the irony of a man who had literally chosen to blast off into the great beyond to fight space bugs calling other people stupid. Guess we were all dumb in our own ways.
Still, it was sort of a trip. The same planet that nurtured us, that made us strong as a species, also made us weak when our soft, fragile bodies were stacked against a grizzled, hardened Acburian empire.
“Annabelle?” I asked expectantly.
“The area is secure and free of threat for two hundred kilometers in every direction,” she replied.
I hated the fact that the Alliance used kilometers as their standard unit of measurement. Though I’d learned about it in school, it never stuck until I was taught about measurement here, until I was told point blank how knowing this stuff would help save my life. There was always something about a direct threat that just got my brain juices flowing.
Still, I would have rather them use something more American, which was probably the most ‘American’ reaction I could have had to it. The Alliance decided to use a more universal numerical set though, something the most people would be comfortable with. The rest of us would just have to learn.
“And the sky?” I asked.
“The sky is clear as well,” she replied, her voice a soothing balm to my mind.
“The sky?” Billy butted in, looking over at me with more than a little terror in his eyes. “Fliers? You think there are fliers even on the moon?”
I used to hear stories when I was a kid about the way the world used to be before everything went to hell. While our spinning ocean blue rock had its problems, none of them were ever of the size, scope, and downright brick-shitting scariness of what we faced when the bugs came.
In fact, the world was such a safe place, that a lot of people had to make up things to be scared of. Mythical creatures; vampires, witches, mummies; all that crap. People used to tell each other stories of monsters under beds and in closets. The funny thing was, when the monsters actually came, people stopped telling stories. Being scared became an everyday part of life, as expected as Sunday dinner and as inescapable as the need for oxygen (which my suit was manufacturing from the ambient gases in the air right now).
The ‘stories’ people heard now didn’t come in front of campfires and
weren’t whispered during sleepovers. They were told on the news, chilling events recounted by men and women of stature and accompanied by video evidence that shook ever the bravest to their core.
Even now, you won’t find a man, women, or child the whole wide world who hasn’t seen those first images. The first photographic evidence of the Acburian threat as it spread through our world faster than even that of a new celebrity baby, which I hear was a very popular type of photo at the time for some reason. It was a picture of a huge bug, marching through the streets, its gilded arms rending bodies with each slash while confused and terrified onlookers stood unable to move, to think, to even attempt to deal with what was coming for them.
It changed the world. Those bugs, groundlings as they would come to be known were a menace, but they seemed, on their face anyway, to be containable. We could deal with them. It would be hard, and we would have to band together, but we could do it.
Then came the fliers.
The first photo of a winged bug, swooping out of the sky and plucking Army General Thomas Madden right out of his boots was the first nail in the coffin for our shared world optimism. We were all taught the story as children, the way the blind faith instilled in us by our leaders at the time soured when we saw fliers descend on our home like a swarm of locusts. Monsters that walked were one thing. Monsters that flew looked and felt like divine wraith raining down from Heaven, and how do you beat the divine?
As a result, it became the thing that really struck fear into the hearts of children. I used to be scared to death of them myself when I was a kid. The idea that they could come out of nowhere and just pluck you off the ground and eat you while there was nothing you could do? That kept me awake at night for years.
Hell, even now I was terrified of them. Though, to be fair, I’d have had to have been the stupidest person in the corps not to be scared of the flying bastards now.
Doomed Space Marine: A Space Adventure (Bug Wars Book 1) Page 6
