I am Automaton 3: Shadow of the Automaton

by Edward P. Cardillo

  She would bide her time until her beloved would return in the form of a new gift to mankind, a gift that would become their ultimate undoing. After all, you can’t eradicate evil…

  …you can only suppress it.

  The End

  Read on for a free sample of Origins

  Conor Stasik has just broken into an alien research facility where humans are tortured and dissected, but aliens are the least of his problems. Something else is roaming the haunted cellblocks and blood-soaked laboratories, something far more vicious. Human and alien corpses are everywhere. Hung from ceilings, stuffed into vents, torn apart limb from limb with bite marks from head to toe. Nearly everyone is dead, but that doesn’t stop them from walking. Or biting.

  Conor Stasik shut down the computer systems on his fighter and adjusted his suit for the atmosphere.

  “Get to as many of them as you can, Stasik,” Commander Chalmers instructed him over the comm line. “But only if you can. No point making things worse. We’ll send ships to help within the hour. Just stay wired and wait to hear from us.”

  “Yes, sir,” Conor said. He couldn’t promise that he wouldn’t try getting into the compound, though, regardless of the risk.

  The prospect of danger didn’t bother him. The fleet had made it perfectly clear to everyone aboard their warship, the Doorway, that their lives were forfeit the moment they enlisted. It was just the way of things out in deep space. Ever since humans encountered extraterrestrials and war had broken out with species from beyond their solar system, none of the astronauts expected to return home in one piece. So, as far as Conor was concerned, he was already on borrowed time, and dying in an attempt to rescue his captive brothers and sisters from the Doorway was just as good as dying anywhere else in the far reaches of the Milky Way. Maybe better.

  It wasn’t all death wishes and resigned recklessness for him, though. He loved his shipmates. A handful of them especially. Life at sea (the navy still referred to the vacuum as water, a habit that refused to die), along with the intense training regimen on the Doorway, had forged a bond between Conor and a few of his crewmates greater than he’d ever felt with his real family. If he could find a way to break even one of them out of captivity, his death would be worth it.

  Exhaling deeply, he finished calibrating the gravity equalizers on his boots and headed for the exit hatch at the back of his vessel.

  “Doorway, this is Ensign Stasik. I’m ready to scout the perimeter of the compound on your mark,” he said into his comm link.

  There was a long pause while the transmission reached from the planet’s rocky surface to the other side of its second moon, where the Doorway hid beyond the range of Kalak scanners. Or so they hoped.

  “Proceed, Ensign Stasik.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He pushed a button on the control panel beside the hatch and it gasped open.

  The wind drove him back into the ship.

  Damn.

  Conor grimaced. It was going to be a long walk.

  Especially in this god-awful place.

  Baru Sheen was a miserable planet inside and out. He’d known about the strong winds and dust swirls that made visibility difficult a meter or two above the surface, but he hadn’t been prepared for the iron in the air. The smell was so strong that it soaked through his suit and made the oxygen in his glass-domed helmet taste like blood.

  “Cutting communications, Doorway. I’ll report back once I’m inside.”

  “Understood,” the commanding officer responded. Conor couldn’t tell who the C.O. was over the howling wind, but it couldn’t have been Chalmers because there was no warning or objection to his plan of entering the compound. He supposed that was one upside to radio silence. There weren’t many others.

  But as nice as it would have been to stay wired all the way to the base, it wasn’t worth the risk. If he tried connecting close to the compound, the Kalak sensors would pick up on his comm link almost immediately. And it wouldn’t do him much good to be in contact with the ship, anyway. The fleet was already assembling whatever backup they could spare for a rescue operation. There was no point calling for help. The Doorway hadn’t even been able to get Conor’s small fighter off planet.

  Could be worse.

  He could have been inside the facility already with the rest of the humans. After all, he’d been a part of the same mission team that had been overrun. By pure luck, he’d narrowly avoided capture. If he’d been any closer to the front of the line or even a ship or two farther back, he would have been taken along with the rest of his team.

  Now, though, it appeared his luck had run out. The higher-ups in the fleet had decided it was too risky for him to try slipping past the Kalak surface-to-air defense cannons, and they were probably right. He wouldn’t have made it ten kilometers from the base before his ship was blown to hell, and then the Kalak would have a lock on the Doorway’s position, too.

  So, Conor was alone. The entirety of the rescue party for the unfortunate captives, and an inexperienced one at that. He wasn’t even close to being out of the woods yet.

  Just before he severed communications, Commander Chalmers cut in. “Good luck, Stasik. We’ll get you out of there as soon as we can.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The line clicked and, this time, Conor was truly cut off from humanity. Back in the howling wind with a strange, purple and blue sky above, and the canyons rolling away from the acidic sea. Back in Hell, in other words.

  Back on Baru Sheen.

  Baru Sheen.

  The planet’s name came from the Kalak words for ‘wasteland’. It had been assigned other monikers before the Kalak claimed it (not that anyone was challenging them), but that was long before humans knew anything about them or the inhospitable world beyond Earth’s solar system.

  And it was inhospitable. Not even the monstrous Kalak were capable of surviving the harsh winds and dry air of the planet’s surface. They’d had to employ an army of mechs to construct their scattered military research facilities across Baru Sheen while they’d monitored progress from one of its moons. Therefore, there was little chance Conor would come in contact with any living creature before he reached the Kalak compound. He supposed he could at least take comfort in that. No ambushes, guns for hire, or local abominations to slow him down. The difficulty would be finding the facility at all with such choking darkness around him. It would be easier to walk off a cliff to his death outside of the canyons, especially since the gravitational pull on Baru Sheen was stronger than elsewhere in the galaxy, even with the equalizers in his suit. And in the high velocity wind, one of the sharp canyon rocks was liable to tear right through his suit. In fact, there were plenty of ways to die on Baru Sheen. Plenty of imaginative deaths he could suffer before even the first wave of help from the Doorway arrived.

  But for all those horrible possibilities, his captive shipmates were surely living the worst of them, and that gave him urgency if not courage.

  Careful to synchronize his steps with the new weight of the boots, Conor slowly made his way down the ramp to the rocky ground, where he paused to consult the holographic map of the compound that had been programmed into his suit. It wasn’t much, but it gave him some ideas.

  “Beginning rescue mission,” he said into his suit’s recorder.

  Linked to the ship or not, he was still required to detail his mission in case something happened to him. At least until the fighting began or stealth was required. If the Doorway didn’t hear from him in the next few hours, they would establish an emergency connection with his suit to locate him and extract the recorded data…provided that his suit hadn’t been completely destroyed. It seemed like a stupid requirement to Conor, especially now, on this particular mission. If he died, his suit would more than likely be destroyed beyond repair, and if he survived, there wouldn’t be any need to document his experience outside of the idle curiosity of military historians and the media. Unless, of course, there was an inquiry into his actions by the C
rown, but that rarely happened during the war, and even when it did, it was rarely considered a reliable account.

  Still, with it being the first mission of his career, he was committed to protocol. For now.

  “I landed just over two kilometers south of the Kalak facility. Approaching the main canyon now.”

  Even within the protection of his domed helmet, his voice was barely audible over the wind.

  Who gives a shit?

  The comm officers could worry about isolating his vocals later if they needed to.

  If he’d had the time or resources to devise a better approach than creeping through the canyon to the hangar entrance, he might not have felt so anxious about the lack of visibility on the snaking, isolated paths the acid ocean had carved long before the Kalak had dammed the sea. But since his mission was a full blown emergency, he had no other options. The Kalak facility was part of a peninsula overlooking a steep drop into a sea of Candric Acid: a unique liquid found only in the Corona System that could burn through his suit, skin, and bones in a matter of seconds. The only true alternative was an aerial drop onto the roof of the facility or into one of the waste outlets that emptied by the sea, but the Kalak had already demonstrated how their defense turrets could eliminate human aircraft, and it would be a long time before the Doorway was capable of sending one in, anyway.

  In other words, Conor was shit out of luck. His first mission was a suicide mission.

  Could be worse, he thought again.

  At least now that he was closer to the base, he could see where he was going.

  He walked down the canyon for a while, careful to stay in the shadows of the watchtower lights, although they didn’t seem to be manned as far as he could tell. That was strange, especially since surface interference on Baru Sheen made it difficult to pick up heat signatures below ten meters.

  “One kilometer out,” he told his suit recorder.

  It was strange speaking into a hypothetical future like that, he thought. Especially one which presupposed his death. An issue for another time, he supposed.

  The main hangar entrance appeared up ahead of him. A long, stone ramp, much closer than he’d expected. One and a half kilometers from his ship, then, rather than two. That probably made his likelihood of escape worse, actually, but it was too late to worry.

  Now, he could see the main guard towers and their swiveling lights. These ones were definitely manned.

  Better look for cover, he told himself, forcing away his anxiety with a deep breath. If he didn’t stop every once in a while to regroup, he was likely to overlook something important. This was, after all, his first mission, and not an easy one. It wasn’t like the holo training. This time, he didn’t have someone in his ear directing him. He was one hundred percent accountable for his actions, and rushing straight up the gut to a manned Kalak stronghold was an easy way to suffer the ultimate accountability lesson, not just for himself, but for his fellow crewmen and women in the dungeons beneath the surface.

  He didn’t necessarily care for every one of them, but there was one person, alive or dead, who provided more than enough motivation to keep going.

  Wendy.

  “Scanning for alternate entrances,” he informed the future annalists.

  He glanced down at his wrist, waiting for the topographical hologram to project again. It was another strange feeling, he reflected, to be standing out in the Baru Sheen winds with so much gravity pulling him down. His legs were more or less stationary because of the boots, but his upper body felt like it had caught its own current. He struggled to keep his arms and neck steady.

  When the hologram finished loading, he shuffled up to the canyon wall searching for cover from the wind.

  Perfect, he thought as he viewed the results.

  His luck hadn’t quite run out. There was a small cave roughly five meters ahead to his right. It wasn’t very deep, but he had a few charges to take care of that.

  Maybe. But what about the noise?

  The crash of the sea and the howling wind would drown out a small explosion, but he might need something big. The rock on Baru Sheen was maddeningly resilient. It had to be to withstand the relentless waves of acid beating against it. Otherwise, Conor would have been able to widen the hole with the torch beam on his glove.

  The charges will do, he assured himself. They have to.

  An echoing roar startled him back a few steps, followed by a burst of weapons fire near the main entrance.

  Shit…

  He drew his SX-90 rifle and crouched against the canyon wall.

  Kalak.

  They’d spotted him. He was sure of it. And now he was trapped in the middle of an open canyon without a way up or out aside from the main hangar entrance. Until he planted the charges, he wouldn’t be able to get through to the cave, either.

  Breathe.

  He exhaled and squeezed the rifle against his chest.

  There was another series of loud reports from a weapon that was far too powerful to be a standard-issued fleet rifle.

  Conor risked a quick glance toward the watchtowers and held his breath.

  There was only one Kalak watchman up in the towers, and, by the looks of it, the alien had gone mad. It was shooting at three giant, reptilian creatures scurrying across the canyon floor.

  More Kalak.

  Two of them were running down the third, who was scrambling like hell to get over the fence and away from the gaping hangar entrance. None of the ground trio had weapons, but the watchman’s rifle, powerful as it was, didn’t seem to have much effect on them, either. Bullet after bullet tore into their chests, arms, and legs, but they kept running toward the fence, never once taking their eyes from the lead runner or faltering in the least.

  Steady.

  It looked like the lead Kalak was going to beat the others over the fence, and that meant trouble for Conor. Once it was on his side, they’d be practically on top of each other. And even though the runners were unarmed, it was never easy to face a Kalak head on, let alone three. They were too big. Too powerful.

  This is it, Conor thought.

  He didn’t have a prayer.

  Then, the lead runner made it over the fence, bleeding from the neck. The pursuers were bleeding, too, and they were having much more difficulty negotiating the climb.

  He could almost smell them.

  One way or another, Conor knew he wasn’t getting out of the canyon alive. If those three bastards didn’t tear him apart and the watchman didn’t shoot him, one of them would at least sound the alarm and the whole goddamned base would be on him in a heartbeat.

  Fuck it.

  Might as well go down fighting.

  No longer worried about stealth, he stepped out of the shadows, scowled, and raised the SX-90 at the approaching Kalak.

  Here we go.

  His hands took over before his brain had a chance to slow them down.

  Slow and purposeful.

  He targeted the lead runner first. It took two quick shots to the head from seven meters but the big bastard fell with an unsettling look in its gray eyes, far too close to relief for comfort. Conor didn’t waste time worrying over it. The lead hadn’t even hit the cracked canyon floor before he swung the barrel of the SX-90 around and pointed it up at the watchmen.

  Nothing wild. No nerves.

  He pulled the trigger.

  To Conor’s surprise, the guard was even easier to pick off than the lead Kalak because it was stuck in the tower and hadn’t seen him yet. In fact, it never even stopped firing at the other two runners. It only took one steady shot this time and the Kalak flipped over the side of the watchtower onto the top of the canyon wall.

  He was only halfway through, but at least the runners were still stuck on the other side of the fence.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind, Conor was damned impressed with himself.

  First mission jitters my ass.

  He quickly pushed the thought aside. It was too early to celebrate. If the runners got ba
ck through the open hangar door, he’d be in even bigger trouble. The shots from the guard had been loud, and so had Conor’s. For all he knew, a whole battalion of Kalak troops were about to storm into the canyon with a hurricane of bullets, ready to pulverize him into a glob of dark flesh on the cracked ground.

  Letting the runners call down the thunder certainly would make his job more difficult.

  “Hey!” Conor yelled to them, trying to distract them in case they gave up on the fence and decided to return with reinforcements. “Fuckface!”

  The bloodied Kalak turned and looked at him, growling so loud and low that Conor could feel it in his tailbone. It almost made him pull the trigger before he was ready.

  Wait for it. Calm down.

  He jogged the last few steps towards the fence and took aim.

  They were much more frightening up close than he’d thought they would be, but he’d never seen a Kalak before in his life. The gaping bullet holes in their necks and temples were particularly gruesome and terrifying. So were their enormous jaws and the gore dripping from their chins.

  Incredibly, they were so frenzied that they ran full speed into the fence over and over to reach him. Their teeth were bared. They didn’t even use their hands to protect themselves from the impact.

  Conor jerked back in alarm, expecting either the fence to give or one of their giant hands to break through and grab him even though the holes were too small. They stepped away again and roared instead.

  “Come on!” he shouted back, masking his fear with rage. He needed to bring them in close one more time to feel confident with his aim. His hands were shaking too much to trust.

  “Fuckers!”

  In the heat of the moment, he’d slipped into English rather than Standard Galactic Speak. Judging by the blind hunger in the runners’ eyes, though, he didn’t think they would have understood anyway. There was one thing on their minds.

  Blood.