by Steve Perry
I love you, her thoughts came unspoken to Billie. I need you.
Yes, Billie thought.
She was the queen, and she reached for Billie, her clawed hands glistening.
Come and… join with me, the queen said.
Yes, Billie thought. Yes, I will.
Closer the queen came.
* * *
Easley and Bueller squatted behind the remains of the shattered building, a waist-level row of bricks and twisted rebar the only protection against the bunker’s R-O-M gun. It couldn’t see them but the stupecomp running the gun could probably pick up some heat leakage from their combat suits, and every now and then it would pop off a couple dozen 30mm AP rounds in their direction.
“Shit,” Bueller said. “Fucker’s got us pinned down!”
“Maybe not,” Easley offered. “The thing’s got service portals aft. I can launch a grenade in the right spot, it’ll blow the power. Then we got his ass.”
Three rounds of 30mm clipped a couple of centimeters of brick off the top of the wall over Bueller’s head. He squatted lower. “Damn!”
“Okay, look,” Easley said, “here’s the play. You scoot down about twenty meters, put your weapon over the wall, and spray that sucker. I’ll circle around behind it and blow it off line while it’s potting at you.”
Under the kleersteel faceplate of his helmet cover, Bueller frowned. The expression wrinkled the skintite that reached to his eyes, and the skull of the elite Colonial Marine whack-team embossed on the tite.
“Unless you got a better idea?” Easley said.
Bueller shook his head. “What the hell. Let’s do it. Gimme a signal when you’re ready to dance.”
“Copy,” Easley said. His voice was crisp in the helmet’s bonephones. The com was standard military tightbeam and scrambled, so the geezer in the bunker couldn’t hear them, or even if he could, he wouldn’t be able to understand what they were saying.
Bueller moved off, keeping low. Every so often the range-of-motion gun would cap off a few more shots.
Easley lit a low-heat flare and dropped it. With any luck, the gun would think it was a suit leak and zero in on it. While it was doing that, he would blow that sucker. He moved off. He was good, one of the Corps’ best, and damned if he was gonna get drilled by some geezer in a lock box.
When he got into position, Easley said, “Do it!”
Thirty meters away, crouched behind a big chunk of rubble that was probably once a house, Bueller whipped his carbine over the top and triggered it full auto. He waved it back and forth, so the motion sensors would get it. The sonics would have found it pretty quick anyhow, but he didn’t want to take any chances.
Softsteel slugs spanged off the wall, chopping it away. It knew he was here, all right. Bueller pulled his weapon back so it wouldn’t get hit.
Five seconds later, two things happened: a grenade went off and the robotic gun stopped shooting.
Bueller grinned. “Yeah! Way to go, buddy!” Easley must have rammed one right up the thing’s drainpipe. Hell of an enema.
Ten seconds went past. “Easley?”
“You’re buying the beer tonight, pal,” came the reply.
Bueller stood. Oh, man, was this sweet! That old fart thought he could play with the best—
A round splashed against Bueller’s chest.
“Oh, shit!”
He looked down, saw the spatter of phosphorescent green over his heart. If it had been armor-piercing, he’d be history. “Shit, shit, shit!”
“You got that right,” Wilks said. “How do you do, Mr. Shit.” He walked toward Bueller, a training sniper rifle dangling in one hand. Behind Wilks, Easley stood, helmet cover already off, a similar splash of green running down the formerly clear faceplate.
Backing Easley was a squad of marines in field underdress, watching. Wilks wore a synlin coverall and formplast boots.
“You guys stink,” he said. “Sure, you sidestepped a few mines and avoided a couple of triplines and you managed to take out a robot gun, but you’re still dead meat because you moved stupid.”
Behind Wilks, Easley leaned over to the trooper next to him. “You getting this, Blake?”
The second marine, a short blond woman with her hair in the standard combat buzz, nodded. “Yup. Real learning experience. He made you guys look like dung birds.”
Easley frowned. “Hey—”
Bueller cut in. “Wait a sec, Sarge. I heard Easley on the tightbeam!”
“No, you didn’t. You heard me.”
“But—but—that’s—that’s—”
“Cheating,” Wilks finished. “Life is hard. You think these things we’re going up against are going to play by some kind of rules?”
Bueller stared at the splotch on his suit.
“So, boys and girls, in honor of this stirring work by Easley and Bueller, we’re going to spend the day on the shooting course. Full battle gear, combat scenarios until you can get across without being splashed.” Wilks smiled at Bueller, then Easley. “If a wasted old geezer like me can fan two of the CMC’s supposedly best whack-teams as easy as I did, the colonies are in a shitload of trouble if they ever need anything worse than a cut skinbonded. Saddle up, marines.”
The squad moved off, grumbling.
“—Bueller, you asshole—”
“—damn, Easley, now look what you got us into—”
“—Buddha, you two guys looked like crap—”
Wilks watched them go, pleased. Of course, he had to rag their asses, that was a TO’s job, and since Stephens had busted him out of loading the ship, this was what he could do. But despite his criticism, these guys were good. They’d been together a year, they were all rated high in small arms, explosives, standard strategy and tactics. If he hadn’t cheated, he wouldn’t have gotten the two hot rods coming at him. They were a lot better than he’d expected. He’d go into enemy fire with this team anytime.
As they pulled armor from the carryall and began to suit up, Wilks remembered his squad on Rim. Were these guys as good as that unit had been? Probably. It was hard to say for sure until things went sour—drill wasn’t the same as real, no matter how you tried to make it so. This squad had better scores in training and they moved real well when the return fire was nothing more than splashers. If they moved as well in the real world when the bad guys started coming, then, yeah, they would do better than the squad had on Rim.
He hoped to all the gods that they moved better. It was one thing to come up against a nest of the aliens, another thing to be on a planet full of the damned things. And who knew but that their homeworld might have worse living on it? Maybe the aliens he’d fought were like mice compared to the worst on their planet. That was a sobering thought. If this team was going to go down and come back, they needed to be good. They needed to be the best. If he could teach them everything he remembered, if he could drill them until they could pointshoot a demicredit out of the air, if he could teach them what they’d be up against…
“If” was a big word, even though it didn’t look it. There wasn’t going to be any room for error in this mission. Screwups would get somebody dead.
And not just dead. The old saying was wrong here: they could kill you and then they could eat you. And they would do worse if they took you alive.
The team began to amble back. Wilks brought his thoughts away from what might be to what was. “All right, children, let’s see if we can’t cross the street without getting run down by a hovercab, shall we? Blake, you take point, Easley, you’re TC, Bueller, HW-tactical, Ramirez—”
He finished ordering the squad, then started to give them the scenario. No, he decided. Let them figure it out on the fly. Instead of telling them what they would face, he said, “It’ll take forty-five seconds for the holocomp to program the new playing field. That’s what you got, people. See if you can’t look like marines and not a bunch of turds on legs this time!”
Wilks spoke into his comp-control mike.
Around them th
e crumbled walls and bunker began to shimmer and dissolve as the computer pulled the plug on the last scenario. Wilks turned and walked away as the obstacle course began to rebuild itself. It would look real and within limits even feel real, but it was an illusion.
What they would be facing when the time came was no illusion. You could spit on that, marine, and damn well make it shine.
8
The conference-room door loomed in front of Billie like the mouth of doom. The conference room in which the review team waited, as it had so many times before.
She took a deep breath and went inside.
Dr. Jerrin stood there, and he wasn’t smiling.
Not a good sign.
“Have a seat, Billie,” he said.
She looked at the other six faces. Three were doctors she knew, one a medical center administrator, one a legal rep for the government, one her legal rep, the last one here to make sure the usual lynching was all nice and legal.
Billie sat.
Jerrin looked at the other members of the team. He cleared his throat, fiddled with a flat screen on the table. “Ah, Billie, we seem to have come to an… impasse in your treatment.”
“Really?” Billie said. She couldn’t keep the irony out of her voice, but it didn’t make any difference. This was only a matter of form. They weren’t going to let her out. Not now. Probably not ever. She was going to spend her life in this place.
“Dr. Hannah has suggested a new treatment which, while fairly, ah, dramatic, offers a chance for us to stop these nocturnal episodes of yours.”
Billie perked up, but only a little. “Really?” Less sarcasm now.
Jerrin looked at Hannah, a fat blonde from some cold climate, at least to judge by how frigid her words always seemed. Hannah said, “Yes, we’ve had some success in penal colony treatments with it. It is a fairly simple procedure, an operation using a fine surgical laser that eliminates predefined areas of certain cerebral complexes—”
“What?! You’re talking about burning out my brain!”
“Now, Billie,” Jerrin began.
“Fuck that! I won’t!”
Hannah smiled, a sour expression. “It’s not really up to you, dear. The state has certain prerogatives here. You are a danger to yourself and others with your fantasies—”
“They aren’t fantasies! Wilks was here, Wilks, the marine who saved me on Rim! Ask him! Find him and ask him!”
She was on her feet now, yelling at Hannah.
The door opened and two orderlies came in, shockers in hand.
“What’s she on?” Hannah asked, as if Billie were deaf or not in the room.
Jerrin said, “Triazolam, Haliperidol, Chlorpromazine, double maintenance dose.”
“See?” Hannah said. “Habituation. We’ve rotated her through everything we have and she’s used to them all. She shouldn’t be able to do much more than walk—and look at her.”
Billie struggled in the grip of the two orderlies, able to move them slightly despite their size.
Jerrin sighed. “I suppose you’re right.”
“Dr. Jerrin! No! Please!”
“It’s for the best, Billie. You’ll be a lot happier without the dreams.”
“But what else will it cost me? Will that be all you take, the dreams?”
Jerrin stared at the table.
“Will it?”
“There may be some slight collateral damage. Minor loss of memory in some areas.”
“You fuckers are going to burn who I am away, aren’t you? Turn me into a zombie!”
“Now, Billie—”
With a strength born of terror, Billie jerked free of the orderlies and turned to run. She made it to the door before a third orderly slapped her side with his shocker. She fell, unable to control her voluntary muscles.
Oh, God! They were going to wipe her brain. She might as well be dead, because when they were done, there wasn’t going to be anybody home.
9
Wilks stared at the computer image as the numbers and words swirled into oblivion. Damn. Had to look, didn’t you, Wilks? Had to satisfy your fucking curiosity. Well, now you know.
And now that you do, what are you going to do about it?
Wilks slid out of the form-chair in front of the military terminal. The room was in the MILCOM library complex, normally reserved for officers, but he was a special case, wasn’t he? And even if he hadn’t been given an emergency clearance to use the system, he could have gotten into the files. You didn’t do nineteen years in the Corps without learning a few things.
A few groundpounders sat in booths, working in the stale air as Wilks walked out of the library. It was hard to make rank without combat or offworld duty at least, and these guys were all cracking the files, studying, hoping tape-learning education would give them some kind of edge. He didn’t think it would.
He’d have offered them his spot on the mission in a San Francisco second, if they wanted to trade, but that wasn’t gonna happen. He was going, unless he ran, and he couldn’t do that. He’d been running from it too long already.
Okay, pal. You got a look at what you wanted. Now, what are you gonna do about it? Walk away? You’re probably gonna get chewed to soypro a few hours after you get to the aliens’ world. The ship leaves in eight hours, and you are due to log in in six. What else can they do to you?
He nodded to himself as he passed a fat major leaving his studies. The major looked at the chevron rocker on Wilks’s sleeve and frowned. He started to say something, probably going to rag Wilks about being in a restricted officers-only area, but Wilks turned slightly so the man could see the acid burn scars on his face.
The fat major paled, his hand going involuntarily to his own blubbery jowls. Wilks could almost see his mind working. Here was a noncom who wasn’t supposed to be in here and a ranking officer should check to be sure he had reason and permission. On the other hand, the noncom in question had a face like a bad holovee monster program and maybe it was better just to let him pass. Surely he hadn’t wandered in here by accident, somebody must have sent him.
Good thinking, fatso, Wilks thought. He smiled, stretching the scar tissue into a grimace.
Okay, fuck it. He was up to here with all this vermin scat. He knew a guy in Programming owed him a big favor. Time to call it in; wasn’t like he was going to get to collect old debts much longer anyhow. Might as well go out in style.
Wilks headed to find the man who owed him.
* * *
The medical complex loomed like a gleaming and ugly beast of stressed plastecrete and ferrofoam and glass as Wilks left the cab and walked toward it. He had the section, the room number, and a theoretical schedule, courtesy of the programmer in MI-7. Getting off the base hadn’t been a problem either, even though he was restricted. For every system they made to do something, there was a way around it. Rank might have its privileges, but the guys on the line knew a few tricks of their own.
The admit pad on the complex door was an old-style keypad, an antique, but that was why he had chosen this entrance, no eye reader. Wilks punched in the code he’d gotten.
The lock chimed and the door slid open. Hell, this was easier than swatting flies. He walked in.
A human guard leaned back in a chair at a desk, looking at porno projection from his handheld vid viewer. He saw Wilks and the naked bodies vanished as he shut the unit down and glanced at his admission roster.
“Can I help you?”
“Yeah, I’m supposed to see Dr. Jerrin.”
The guard glanced down. Must have seen Jerrin’s name. He waved his hands over the console, brought up the appointment list. “And you are…?”
“Emile Antoon Khadaji,” he said, giving the man a name from an old book he’d once read.
The guard glanced down. “I don’t see your name here, Monsieur Khadaji.”
Wilks hadn’t been able to find and get into the patient file, he hadn’t had time, though he had gotten the doctor’s name right. “I’m a last-minute deal,” h
e said. “Somebody canceled.”
The guard frowned. “I’ll have to check with the doctor,” he said.
“Fine. Check.” He gave the guard a good view of his face. Guy with a face like his surely had psychological problems, right? The guard wasn’t suspicious, just following the drill. Probably didn’t have a lot to do, he had time to watch porno holos.
As the guard reached for the com unit to call the doctor, Wilks moved his right hand slowly toward his right hip. He had a multicharge pistol, a synapse scrambler, nestled in a flexskin holster on his belt just over his right buttock. He’d gotten the weapon on the black market; it was illegally boosted so it could deliver a stun charge at twice the ten-meter distance for approved civilian hardware.
Wilks looked up and down the hallway. Nobody around.
He pulled the stunner, brought it up, held it in both hands. The heavy plastic felt cool in his grip. It threw a fairly narrow beam, you had to aim it, but he’d had a target laser installed under the stubby barrel. The bright red dot danced over the guard and stopped on his forehead.
The guard looked up. “Hey!”
Wilks shot him.
The guard collapsed in his chair. Wilks moved to arrange him so he looked like he had dozed off. The man would wake up in half an hour with one bitch of a headache, but otherwise should be fine.
He pulled the guard’s bar code ID off and clipped it to his shirt pocket. It wouldn’t fool a scanner if the thing tried to match his retinal patterns to it, but a human passerby would see that Wilks had a tag and probably think nothing of it. By the time the guard came to, things would be all over, one way or another. But just in case, Wilks bent and fed in the security system lock code virus he’d gotten. The computer terminal digested the code. If it did what it was supposed to do, it would infect the main system in this building. Nobody was going to be calling for outside help from here for a long time, not unless they went to a window and hollered for it. That didn’t do anything for internal security, but Wilks figured he could deal with that. He was a Colonial Marine, by all the gods, and the day he couldn’t handle some sloppy rent-a-cops, he’d shoot himself. He tucked the stunner back into its holder under his civilian jacket and smiled.
