The Expanding Universe 4: Space Adventure, Alien Contact, & Military Science Fiction (Science Fiction Anthology)

by Craig Martelle

  At the top of the stairs, we stopped. She needed to administer another stim, and I needed to come to grips with what I saw fifty meters away: one of our special weapons crates, the whole point of our trip down to the surface.

  Midnight blue, twice the size of the gear cases, supposedly much sturdier.

  But this one was cracked in half on the roof of a sagging building, guts sprayed down the front and mingled in with the carpet of broken glass.

  Hopkins hopped over to me. “That one of the weapon crates?”

  “Was.”

  She twisted around. “You had somebody in this area?”

  “Yeah.” I pointed toward the building opposite the one with the weapon crate on its roof. “In there.”

  “Alive?”

  “Good vitals.” I didn’t tell her how Beyers’s vitals had looked good at first. Good enough.

  Preen didn’t respond to radio or texts. I nearly abandoned him, but the vitals…it looked too good to pass up.

  I left Hopkins in the building lobby, hidden in a lift car caught halfway between floors. I could’ve used a lift about then. Preen’s signal was coming from eight stories up, not something I would’ve enjoyed on the best of days. Dust and grime covered the cracked stairs, and that gave me some hope, because there were boot steps leading up.

  Fresh boot steps.

  And since the Leviathans and their minions didn’t have feet or wear boots, that left Preen.

  The door to the eighth floor was gone, blasted from its twisted hinges. The sun was lost behind clouds, and the light filtered through the strange haze. I switched to infrared and started pinging Preen’s armor for a clean signal. For some reason, it was denying my connection requests, but I still had a good idea where it was.

  Out of all the doors I’d seen since exiting the stairwell, only one was closed. Preen’s armor was behind that.

  I raised a hand to knock, then reconsidered. If he was alive, he was seeing my signal just beyond the door. If something had somehow taken control of the suit, as SS6 feared might be possible, then it probably knew where I was, too.

  No knocking.

  Optimistically, he could be out cold. Or some of his control systems could be broken. Or…

  I kicked the door in and ducked around the side.

  Nothing.

  I poked my head in, weapon ready.

  Preen lay on the floor, faceplate up, gasping, tears pooling around his washed-out green eyes, lips quivering. His concentration was locked onto something only he could see.

  “Steven, right?” I squatted beside him, caught the slight nod he managed. “Anything broken?”

  “No.” Soft as a breeze.

  “You eject?”

  “Yes.”

  “Smart move.” I shrugged a CAWS-5 off my shoulder and sat it on the floor beside him. “It’s just you and Dong now.”

  Those green eyes slowly tracked over to me. “Dong’s an asshole.”

  “He is. That’s why I’m going to need you.”

  “Mission’s a bust.” He swallowed. “Three of us and our carbines. No match.”

  I held up a grenade. “We’ve got fireworks.”

  “That what you took Sergeant Desai out with?”

  Ouch. Travis might have chuckled. “I’ll be more careful this time. Give it a little extra to be sure it goes where I mean.”

  Preen blinked the tears away. “Weapons systems broken. Across the street.”

  “Saw that. SS6 sent down enough crates to build ten of their little Avengers.” That was our secret test weapon: Avengers. “I’ve got signals for five more.” I only had three, but he didn’t know that.

  He groaned. “Hopeless.”

  “It’s not over yet, Steven.”

  He held a hand up, and I helped him into a sitting position. He considered the weapon. “I saw a pack of Hyenas on the way down. Fifty. A hundred.”

  Hyenas were the most numerous of Leviathan minions, strange predators about the size of the Earth animal of the same name. The Leviathans’ little monsters had the same low backend and thick necks. Their weird lope was also similar to their namesake, but that was where the similarities ended. Because the Leviathan Hyenas were more like lizards, with big, shiny scales and razor gums rather than fur and teeth. Their claws were like miniature scythes that could actually penetrate the Juggernaut armor with time, and it enabled them to climb damn near any surface. Their razor gums were even worse.

  Twenty would be trouble. A hundred? “Where were they?”

  “East. I think. Southeast. Headed this way. Like they knew we would fall here.”

  “That’s the way it is with the Leviathans, all interconnected.”

  He sighed.

  I stood. “Found a wayward soldier. Smashed-up leg. I could sure use some help with her.”

  He picked up the gun, then got to his feet. “Can I have a grenade?”

  “Sure.” One frag, one incendiary—enough to get a fluttering smile from him.

  Preen took over hauling Hopkins around for me. I focused on moving us ever west, away from the Hyena pack. Before long, the two of them were chattering mindlessly. She knew Dong and held the same opinion of him: useless.

  That made it easier when I picked up a good signal from a weapons crate that was north, away from Dong’s location. “We’ve got a functional crate. That way.”

  Preen glanced back the way we’d come. “They’re closing, you know.”

  “Let’s get that weapon up and running.”

  I felt exposed crossing a big street, but I couldn’t rightly yell at the two of them to hurry. They were doing what they could.

  The crate dangled about six meters off the ground, its parachute cabling hung up in a deformed antenna on the roof of a low building. I jumped up to the roof, bunched the cables in my left hand, and cut them with the Juggernaut’s embedded blade, then went for a ride across the rooftop. The armor had the strength to lower the crate gracefully, but there was no grip. I let go of the cables a couple meters short of the edge, and a deafening crack rolled up from below.

  The crate signal still showed green.

  SS6’s weapon could have passed for a radar dish. In a sense, it was. I was anything but a weapons expert, but the way I heard it described, the idea was to use the Leviathans’ macabre nature against them. They communicated using something analogous to extremely low frequency—ELF—that enabled them to transmit everything over great distances. Even thoughts. It was believed to give them something of a hive mind, for good and bad. Sending a new signal over the same frequencies should cause disruption. How intense that disruption would be…well, we were the guinea pigs.

  I set the weapon up in the crook of one of the mangled antenna’s support legs. Everything showed green when I flipped the switch, but the world didn’t suddenly revert to what it had been before. No Leviathans appeared and burst into flame.

  We supposedly needed three of the things running for them to work. Three.

  I snorted.

  Then I saw the Hyena pack—a black wave washing over the area we’d just left to the south.

  “That’s a hundred. Easily a hundred.”

  I jumped down and waved to Preen. “Move it!”

  Three of us wouldn’t be enough. We needed to find Dong. We needed to get onto a rooftop or near a natural chokepoint that gave us at least a slim chance to funnel the things into overlapping fields of fire.

  About two hundred meters east, we found Dong. He’d survived the drop unharmed.

  Physically.

  He was struggling to carry three bodies.

  Parts of three bodies. Torsos, mostly. The armor was offline, so there was no way to know who the people had been.

  Dong dropped his gory cargo when he saw me. “Great job, Sergeant Wilson!”

  The Hyenas were close. Their reptilian musk reminded me of walking through a fish market, but one that just happened to have a bunch of crocodile corpses.

  “Dong—Jerry. We’ve got Hyenas coming. We need to
get to cover, lay—”

  He laughed and kicked one of the torsos. “We’re dead! Just like them!”

  “You’re not dead yet. You don’t snap out of it, we will be. All of us.”

  “Already are.” Dong dropped to his knees. “Already are.”

  Preen groaned. “He’s snapped. Leave him.”

  Trust your fellow soldier.

  “Can’t do that.” I got a hand around Dong’s shoulder and pulled him along. “There’s a building over there. Only a small open front, some solid-looking stone. It gives us a shot.”

  The building wasn’t quite what I’d hoped, with a modest, open lobby and a spiderwebbed glass wall farther in, but the stairwell looked directly onto the lobby.

  It gave us a start.

  I set Dong on the first landing, halfway up to the second floor and had Hopkins watch him. She was pasty, short of breath, and rapidly blinking. But she was another gun, and she tried to talk to Dong. And she seemed to get through a little.

  Preen joined me at the stairwell door, which I had halfway open. “Lob a frag into the lobby?” He pointed at an ideal spot.

  “Yeah. If we get the chance.” I nodded at the hallway to our right. “They break through the windows and come around this way, we won’t get but one throw. Maybe two.”

  “Think they’ll climb to the floor above?”

  “Yeah. I’m hoping they can’t figure the doors out.”

  “You sure the door’s closed up there?”

  I bolted up the stairs, leaping over Dong and Hopkins. The door was closed, but a quick check of the third floor revealed a damaged door, off its hinges. They’d be able to knock it in faster than I’d hoped. Would they know to go to the third floor? No one knew exactly how clever the Hyenas were, just that they were clever.

  I got back to the bottom floor to find Preen swallowing hard. The reptile smell was thick. I could see dark forms rushing across the street. And then I heard it: scraping, like fingernails over a chalkboard.

  His eyes drifted up slowly. “Headed up.”

  “We make this count, we’ve got a chance.”

  He held up a frag grenade. “Remember what you said about your throw.”

  “Right in the middle of the pack, don’t worry.” I pulled my own grenade and sealed my helmet.

  Glass shattered off to our right just as the main body charged into the lobby. They were coming at us three abreast, packed tight. That was the only positive. I’d wanted them to fill the space.

  Preen lobbed his grenade toward the back of the pack; I aimed for the middle.

  Another group raced toward us from the right, these only a couple abreast. I had just enough time to toss another grenade toward them.

  The explosion roared. Shrapnel whistled. Bodies flailed and twisted.

  We fell back, up a few steps, and let the first ones come through the door. Porcupine rounds were ideal for these things. Their scales weren’t quite as good as Kevlar, so AP punched through without passing along all its energy. Porcupines? They detonated on impact, tearing away gory chunks that affected even something as nasty as the big lizards.

  Bodies quickly piled up in the doorway, slowing the others. We stuck to controlled bursts, conserving ammo, the boom of gunfire and dying hisses of the lizards too loud to hear the dropped magazines clattering off the concrete steps.

  The charge abruptly stopped.

  With my audio intake ratcheted back to peak, I caught the scrape of claws on the steps above. “They’re coming down! Preen, watch the door!”

  I jumped over Dong and Hopkins and pressed into the corner of the landing. The hideous things scampered and slithered over the stairs. They dropped down from far above, landing hard on railings, not even letting out a little hiss to acknowledge the pain.

  Hopkins opened fire first, blasting one that had hurled itself ahead of the others.

  But they were on us almost immediately, so close that even the short delay of changing out a magazine seemed too much.

  It was for Dong.

  One of them clamped onto him and hauled him back up the steps, where others latched on and pulled him higher, out of sight. To his credit, he spared us pointless pleading and screaming. And he probably bought us time, drawing away several of the scaly monsters at a critical point.

  And then it was over. The last of the lizard things to die were gore-spattered, but not with their own green blood.

  I took the magazine from Dong’s dropped weapon. He’d already flatlined, so I didn’t need to go looking for him.

  “We need to move.”

  Wading through all the broken corpses was a gory, joyless task that took precious time. Outside the building, I selected our next signal—another gear case. We’d used up ammo, and our resupply was on the way to the next weapons crate. Hopkins and Preen were pretty quiet the entire way, taking the magazines and grenades I offered without a word. They hadn’t been injured during the engagement, which left only one worrisome reason for their deflation: They believed Dong was right, that we were dead and everything we did was pointless.

  The problem was that I believed the same damn thing.

  In the year since the Leviathans had shown up to wipe out our species, humans consistently experienced only one thing: the failure of leadership. Government collapsed in the first months, then the military stepped in.

  Our leadership became the Special Section. SS1—Control as we called it—was a mix of generals and senior Intelligence Bureau types. They were the voices behind the stern faces of the last remaining bureaucrats.

  SS6 became their greatest asset. Technology. Research and Development. Engineering. They pushed the envelope with our arsenal, always promising a solution but never delivering. It broke the human will, all the failures, watching comrades and innocents die because you don’t have what it takes to win the war.

  And maybe that was what was killing us even quicker—giving up.

  Well, I didn’t feel like giving up right then. We’d just wiped out a pack of Hyenas we had no right to stand against. We’d stood up a weapon that SS6 said might be effective. And I wanted to see Travis again.

  Plus, I’d won the dead pool. That was going to be a sweet chunk of money.

  So I pushed them. Gently. “Hey, guys, just another hundred meters or so to the weapons crate. Good signal. And I’m getting more signals out there. More people. A Vaulter extraction ship. We’ve got each other, right? We can do this.”

  Preen scowled, but Hopkins nodded.

  That was good enough.

  When we reached the weapons crate, I spotted a fairly intact van that looked like it might be functional. The tires were good; it looked like it was one of the hybrid types of vehicles that ran on high-priced petroleum and electricity. I could jump it to life if I had to.

  Unfortunately, I also started picking up another signal: Gerhardt. Almost a klick northwest, away from the Vaulter.

  Tell Hopkins and Preen, or ignore the signal and climb into the van to make a run for the extraction ship? It was about twelve kilometers north. Finding a fourth person should lift spirits and increase our odds of success.

  But Gerhardt?

  The choice was made for me while I was setting the Avenger up in the shadow of a rooftop air-conditioning unit.

  Preen laughed. “Would you look at that! Gerhardt’s alive!”

  I checked the BAS. Gerhardt was a green square, half a klick out and closing. I hurried through the last couple steps to bring the weapon online. “We can’t wait for him. Twelve klicks to get to the Vaulter. We can take that van over there—”

  “Weren’t we supposed to get three of these weapons running?”

  The console showed green all the way. “We got two up. That’ll have to do.”

  “Private Preen’s right.” Hopkins’s voice was a hollow whisper that might have been the wind whistling, except there wasn’t even a soft breeze right then. “They need at least three for it to do anything.”

  They’d gone from throwing in the
towel to worrying about the mission succeeding. People were impossible. “Might be another weapons crate on the way to the Vaulter.”

  “We should hook up with him, I think.” Preen sounded a lot more insistent.

  I wasn’t going to budge them, and I had no justification for trying. I joined them in front of the building. “All right, we hook up with Gerhardt. If we can find another weapons crate, we get a third Avenger online. If we can’t, we come back here and make a run for the ship and try to get out of here.”

  Preen cocked an eyebrow. “Gerhardt’s call, isn’t it?”

  And that right there was why I’d hoped to avoid Gerhardt in the first place. I knew when it was time to bug out. He might be one of those “bitter end” sorts.

  We managed a modest pace, taking a couple rests for Hopkins along the way. The pain was getting worse, the stims and anesthetics becoming less effective by the minute.

  Gerhardt was hunched over a weapons crate when I spotted him, CAWS-5 leaning against the cracked shell. He had tossed aside a few pieces of what looked like wrinkled sheets of tin foil. I could hear him hissing and cursing, apparently completely oblivious to our approach.

  I left Preen and Hopkins and jogged toward our leader. “Sergeant Gerhardt?”

  He snatched his gun up and spun around, wild-eyed. His faceplate was cracked, his helmet dented, and there were scorch marks on his chest. “Wilson?” His eyes tracked to my two wards; he lowered the weapon. “Shit. Next time, yell.”

  “What happened?”

  He glanced down at the black streaks on his armored torso. “Found some new pets. Something that spits napalm. Looked like a sloth almost.”

  “We—” I pointed at Hopkins and Preen. “—got a couple of the Avengers running. There’s an extraction ship about eleven klicks north of here.”

  “Go on, then.” He dug through the ruined crate, then held up a pouch and snorted. “I guess these really are indestructible.”

  Batteries. They were supposed to be the sturdiest piece of the systems, yet SS6 insisted on packing extras. “The second you assume you have enough power, you’ll find out you don’t.” That was their argument until we asked for more grenades and explosives, then mass became the most important part of their calculations for putting the drops together.