“Fair enough.” I folded my arms over my chest as Mina ordered her suit to initiate a direct line of communication to the Alliance, a move that would immediately update our location and diagnostic information in their databases.
“Yes, ma’am,” Mina said after she explained our situation to whoever was on the other end, probably Della. “I understand that, ma’am.” Her voice was terse and unapologetic, though not entirely without humility. “No, ma’am. I made an executive decision. This was my call, and I made it.”
She nodded as our bands updated with a new objective. Then her call ended, and she looked back up at us. “They want a specimen,” she said flatly.
“Of course, they do.” I shook my head. “We don’t know anything about these things. For all we know, they could be toxic to the touch. They could be the most dangerous creatures in the entire fucking universe.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jill said, walking toward us with less precautionary tactics than she should have been showing. “They’re tiny little things.” She chuckled. “God, they’re almost cute.”
A blossom of worry sprouted in my chest. She should have known better.
“You like ‘em tiny, huh?” Claire asked, grinning at the purple haired woman.
Jill’s face flushed and her eyes rolled into the back of her head. “Stop being stupid. I’m just saying that, after dealing with sandworms and fliers and all of that, these are nothing.”
“Size doesn’t matter!” Mina’s exclamation nearly caused me to scoff out loud. “The first thing that nearly killed me was a baby Acburian who was barely bigger than the palm of my hand. I let my guard down, thought it was cute, thought it couldn’t hurt me. It nearly ripped my throat out though, and I never forgot it. You shouldn’t either.” She nodded firmly. “We don’t know anything about this thing, and you’re rushing toward it with open hands, and your head in the clouds. That won’t do any of us any favors.”
I stared at the two women. It seemed strange to me that Jill, who had reacted so poorly to us losing our helmets, who was the reason we had to forgo the approved pathway, would need to be reprimanded for acting too recklessly. Still, if life had taught me anything, it was never to underestimate a woman. They could be a million things all wrapped up in a single package. Hell, some women could even be a million things all at the same time.
“We go about this carefully,” Mina explained, “and we go slowly because, God forbid these things go crazy on us. It looks to me like they outnumber us about a thousand to one.”
She had a point. If these leeches were anything other than completely dormant or completely harmless, we were screwed. We needed to be cautious, and we needed to be lucky.
“Annabelle,” I said, “get me my sampling kit.”
“Affirmative,” the woman in my suit answered.
“Absolutely not.” Mina heard my words and turned to me. “This is my mission, I’ll get the sample.”
“We’ve been over this,” I muttered, trying to keep my voice down and hoping that sound wasn’t a trigger for these things. “You need to stay as safe as possible for the team.”
“Yes and, if I’m not mistaken, the last time we went over this, you nearly got yourself ingested by a sandworm,” Mina scoffed.
“Be that as it may, nothing has changed. You need to let me take these chances. I’m the one who—”
“Breaks protocol,” Jill finished for me as she grabbed the glass beaker that appeared in my hands.
“Give that back,” I said in my best ‘pissed off vice principal’ voice.
“Both of you know how this goes,” she explained. “It’s the same reason we’re the ones on the outside of the group, the same reason why we’re always the lookouts.” She shrugged. “Junior Officers get the short end of the stick. That’s the way it works. You don’t take the chances, either of you.” She looked back and forth between the two of us. “So, if you don’t mind, could both of you please pull yourselves off your respective crosses and let’s all do our job.”
I hadn’t heard Jill speak like this before. Usually, it was Claire who was more of a loudmouth, but maybe that was the point. Maybe Jill had seen the sort of respect that earned Claire before we took the break up there. Maybe she wanted the same kind of respect. I couldn’t get mad at her for that.
“Be careful,” Mina said, conceding to the purple-haired girl.
“Yes, ma’am,” she answered, turning and moving toward the leech pit with more caution than she had showed before.
I watched the shape of her as she knelt down near the creatures. With lithe fingers, she plucked one of the things up and dropped it into the tube. Pressing the top, she closed the thing instantly.
Turning back to us, she smiled and tossed the thing through the air toward me.
“Dammit, Jill!” I said, snatching the tube out of the air. “Don’t play around with artifacts.”
“It’s not an artifact until we get it back to the Alliance.” She walked toward us. “Until then, it’s just a thing. Besides,” she laughed, “everything is fine.” She shook her head. “You see, everything turned out just fine.”
Just then, as though they could hear not only Jill’s words but the relief that lay beneath them, a loud sound emitted from, not one, but all the thousands of leech creatures on the cave floors. It was a deafening, horrible noise—an alarm. We had been found out.
27
The cry of the screeching leeches rang through the cave as the creatures all moved in tandem toward us. Worry rang through me as well. This was louder than anything I’d ever heard before, the noise these leeches were making nearly sent me to my knees. My hands went up to my ears, cuffing them as pain rang through me.
“Dampeners!” I screamed, trying to speak over the ringing and failing miserably. “Annabelle, get me dampeners!” I knew I didn’t need to actually get my suit to hear me for her to oblige my command. She was connected to me through a neurological pathway and, as such, heard my plea before it was even vocalized.
Hopefully, the others were as quick to turn theirs on as I was. Otherwise, I was worried that, assuming their heads didn’t explode, they’d be in for some seriously permanent damage.
As Annabelle put my wishes into effect, the noise from the leeches faded away into the background.
“Unfortunately, due to the sheer volume of the attack, you’ll be unable to hear any noises whatsoever until the decibel levels around you dwindle to a safer level.”
“What about my selective cancellation feature?” I muttered in response.
“It wasn’t designed for this sort of assault.”
“Then why did I pay the extra one thousand and thirty coins?” I scoffed.
“Because you believed it to be a—”
“That was a rhetorical question,” I said, turning to Mina and the others.
Unsurprisingly, Mina was standing straight and tall, a sign that, like me, she had enacted her dampeners and was unfazed by the noise emitting everywhere around us. Jill was already on her knees, and Claire didn’t look far behind.
Training taught us to deal with the strongest of our comrades first. There was little point in exhausting our resources on the weakest, given the already low chance of their survival. Best to pull out the weeds and let the fire have them, to use a phrase my mother always used to when I was a kid on the farm.
We hadn’t been going by protocol lately and, truth be told, I always hated that particular part of the rules anyhow. Everyone was weak around some things, even the strongest of us. By that definition, we were all one unfortunate incident away from death. If that was the case, if that was the world we had decided we wanted to live in, then we might as well let the bugs have it. At least, that was my thought on the matter.
I rushed toward Jill, picking her up with a quick, hard pull.
Her face looked pained, and her face had paled noticeably. This was affecting her on a different level. This noise was making her sick somehow.
I made eye contact with
her, holding her face in my hands long enough to keep it steady.
Widening my eyes, I freed one hand, pointed to my ear, and mouthed the word dampeners. While that wasn’t something most people mouthed on a regular basis, I hoped she’d understand. What was more, I hoped she had the upgrade. Otherwise, she was fucked.
Her eyes narrowed at me and then widened as she seemingly took in my suggestion. A second and a half later, her face and body had relaxed.
Letting go of Jill, who mouthed her thanks at me, I turned my attention to Claire. The woman I had bedded earlier was now on her back, writhing in pain with her skin now sickly pale too. Did the noise these things make spread disease? If so, they might be the most threatening species I had ever come in contact with.
Mina was kneeling over her. Looking up at me, Mina shook her head, letting me know that Claire had realized my worst fear in this situation and was completely unprepared. Stupid woman! She didn’t seem to have anything, and now it was going to cost the girl her life.
Or was it?
From beside me, I saw Jill’s helmet reappear in her hand. She knelt down next to Claire as a multi-tool shimmered into existence in her other hand. She put up one finger, all she had free, three times, indicating that what she was going to do would take roughly three minutes.
Mina nodded in response and Jill went to work, her purple-hair hanging down over her eyes as she dug the tool into the helmet.
I had no idea what she was doing or even what she was capable of. I remembered Mina telling me something about Jill being their resident tech whiz but, as it was, I couldn’t imagine how that would help things. After all, I knew about as much about tech as I did about baking, which was to say, don’t come to me with either a broken carburetor or plans for a Bundt cake. Either way, you’ll come away empty-handed.
Still, I knew that whatever the purple haired woman was up to had the approval of Mina, and that meant it had to be for our good.
“Lieutenant Ryder,” Annabelle, the only voice I could hear with these damn dampeners on, sounded in my head. “External tracking shows five unidentified creatures headed this way. ETA is three minutes.”
“All right,” I answered, nodding and looking at Jill and then Claire, still writing in pain on the floor. Jill had said that it would take her three minutes to do whatever the hell she was doing with the helmet, which would put us on track to run right into the fray with these five creatures.
Jill was busy, Claire was incapacitated, and Mina was trying to make sure the poor woman didn’t rip her own face off from the pain. It would be up to me to fend them off. To that end, I needed to know as much info about the threat as possible. I saw little need in being surprised the way we were with the leeches.
“Scan them, Annabelle,” I said, “and get me my pulse laser.”
The gun appeared in my hand, and as it did, Mina’s eyes darted toward me. Arming myself had definitely caught the woman’s attention.
I looked over to her and was about to send her a message, telling her that Annabelle had surveyed a handful of bugs for me to take care of. Before I could do that though, Annabelle returned to the inside of my head with brand new information that stopped me in my tracks.
“Lieutenant Ryder,” Annabelle said quickly. “I’m afraid I must inform you that the creatures headed your way have all the attributes of elite Acburians.”
“What?” I gasped, my nuts jumping back up into my body. “Are you sure?”
“Scans show a ninety-seven percent likelihood of elite Acburians,” Annabelle confirmed and, just like that, things went from bad to unimaginably worse.
If fliers kept civilians up at night, and sandworms gave officers nightmares, elite bugs made those other things wet their pants with fear.
So dangerous and merciless that most of the people I knew didn’t even like to admit their existence, much less talk about them. Elite bugs were so similar to a goddamned person, they gave me the shakes. Humanoid in nature, they moved the way we did, fought the way we did, and some might say, thought the way they did.
Where all other Acburians lived, for the most part, the way bugs on Earth did, elite bugs wore armor, wielded weaponry, and attacked the way an army of humans might, only stronger, tougher, and better. They were stronger than all but the largest of the Acburians in addition to having all the smarts we humans liked to attribute to ourselves.
Five elite bugs were on their way to us, five killing machines we had no way of fighting off. We needed to run, or we were going to die, and we had almost no time to get away.
“Send a message to Mina,” I said frantically, clutching onto my pulse laser. “Fucking elites, Mina! They’re fucking elites, and they’re on their way here!”
“Should I read that back?” Annabelle asked, her voice the sort of calm that only something that didn’t possess pain receptors could be at a moment like this.
“Just fucking send it!” I snarled, my eyes moving to the opening at the end of this expanse, the point where the elites would undoubtedly come from.
“Transmission sent,” Annabeth reported, but I was too busy staring at Mina to hear her.
The invincible Mina John’s face dropped as her eyes bugged out so far, I was afraid they would pop out of her head. Then she stood, a solemn look on her face.
Just like that, the leeches stop shrieking. After all, this was an alarm. Now that they had alerted their protectors, there was no need to continue.
In an instant, the dampeners shut off, and Jill looked up confused.
“I was almost finished,” she lamented, standing and moving over to Claire. “This was going to act as a dampener might. Is she- is she okay?”
“If she is, it’s not for long,” I said, glad to be able to hear someone else again. “Elites are coming. How long now, Annabeth?”
“Thirty-seven seconds,” she answered. “I’m afraid they’re moving quicker than earlier estimates accounted for.”
“Of course they are,” I said, turning to the others. “Let me pick her up.” I moved toward Claire, intending to grab her. “We need to get back up that hill. We don’t have time to—”
As though it could hear my thoughts and wished to screw with them, the hill itself moved, straightening into a sheer, vertical wall.
“What the hell?” I muttered, staring at it in disbelief.
“Does this normally happen?” Jill asked as I grabbed Claire and slung her over my shoulder. Sheer wall or not, there was only one way out, and that was straight up. “Can this even happen?”
“I didn’t think so,” I admitted, “but apparently, I’m wrong. Come on, we need to find another way out. If we don’t start running, they’re going to find us.”
A roar sounded from off in the distance, and from the darkness, five elite bugs, wearing power armor a lot better looking than mine and holding glowing energy swords, spears, and battle-axes came rushing toward us from the darkness.
“Only five?” I asked, dropping Claire onto the ground and taking a step forward. “Stupid bugs. You should have brought more.”
28
The elites poured in, two at a time in a line, with one at the head. It was strange. There they were, bugs each and every one, yet they were every bit the squad that we were, the squad that I had.
Beneath the armor built from the very Ellebruim this goddamned war had started over, the elites still had exoskeletons. Big black eyes dotted a bulbous angular head, and a pair of antennae shot straight up before arcing forward.
They didn’t speak our language as far as we knew. Of course, up until tonight, we didn’t know any of them existed on this moon either. Naturally, my HUD painted nameplates over each of them, kindly informing me that there were exactly what I thought: Elite Acburian Soldier. There was also a big, flashing red hazard sign next to each one as well as the kindly warning that we should immediately flee. However, if we were lucky enough to kill them, we would earn a special Alliance dispensation of 50,000 coins. Each.
Like that was going to
happen.
“Get behind me,” I said, my eyes trained on the incoming swarm and my muscles tensed with anger, frustration, and fury.
Still, there was something else behind it, a familiarity that stoked a fire that, in one way or another, always burned in my chest. I was a warrior after all. I had been trained to fight. People had told me it was what I was born for, what God Himself created me to do.
In the end, it didn’t matter because, in addition to the reasonable and productive fear pulsating through my veins, there was something else, something I wouldn’t admit to even my closest friends, if I had any that was.
The deep down, know it when you’re lying awake at night, truth of the matter was, I liked this. I liked the challenge. I liked the fight. I liked the blood. God help me, I liked the killing. All I wanted at this very moment was to be Mark Ryder, the best damned Marine anyone had ever heard of, but more than that? I wanted to be these elites’ worst nightmare.
“Are you out of your damn mind?” Mina asked from behind me. I could hear a streak of panic in her voice which was, of course, tempered with wisdom. “Those are five elites. We’ll never make it out of this alive. We need to get out of here. We need to get up this wall.”
I stared at the bugs rushing toward us with weapons at the ready, babbling in some ridiculous bug speak, a dialect that was so rare even Annabelle couldn’t translate it.
“If we head up that wall, they’ll kill us before we get off the ground,” I answered. “We fight. It’s what we do.”
“Not all of us.” Mina swallowed hard. “You have thrusters. You can fly up. We’ll hold them off.”
“Hell no.” The mere suggestion that I would run aggravated me.
“You have the specimen on you,” Mina reminded me as the bugs neared me, neared us. “It has to be delivered to the Alliance. It’s important. Someone must survive this, and right now, you’re the only one who can. You need to get up that wall. That’s an order.”
“Like you said,” I growled, “I’m not on your squad. So, with all due respect, Mina, fuck your order.”
Doomed Space Marine: A Space Adventure (Bug Wars Book 1) Page 17
