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

by Craig Martelle

  I gave the crate a closer look. The rest of it was mangled junk. “One of the other squads’ll get one running.”

  He straightened, then tapped his helmet. “We’re all there is.”

  “Your helmet’s a mess. You couldn’t possibly know. You didn’t even hear us coming up on you.”

  “No. Before I took this damage. Casualty reports from the rest of the company. Eighty percent fatalities. The Leviathans knew somehow.”

  Eighty percent! “The gear wasn’t good enough.”

  He shook his head. “The gear worked. They just…knew.” Despite the words, there was a hint of doubt.

  “That still means some others made it. Let them do their part.”

  He stood. “You want to get out of here, you make a run for that ship. There’s got to be another crate around here somewhere.”

  “Two klicks southwest.” I glanced back the way we’d come. “We ran into a Hyena pack back that way. Big pack. I think there’s worse coming from there.”

  “Who you got with you? Is that Preen?”

  “Yeah. And Private Hopkins. She’s the one with the mangled leg. We found Dong, but the lizards got him.”

  “Hopkins was in Cortez’s platoon.” He dusted his hands off and headed southwest. “Get them out of here.”

  I followed. I would be an ass if I didn’t at least try to change his mind. “You can’t make it. It’s thirteen klicks, assuming you even survive getting the dish set up. They know we’re here, and they’re coming for us. We can’t wait that long.”

  “So don’t wait.”

  Hopkins and Preen’s eyes said they weren’t leaving Gerhardt. Thirteen klicks. Heading back into the city where we knew the Leviathans had things looking for us.

  I fell in behind Gerhardt and waved for them to do the same.

  Gerhardt slowed his pace without a word and changed his course, taking us along a shielded sidewalk that had suffered surprisingly little damage. Hopkins stumbled a couple times, but Preen kept her upright; the two chattered like birds at sunrise. Their words were carried away on a breeze that picked up suddenly and tossed the detritus of a dead world at us—rustling paper, crinkly plastic. Our shadows grew longer and dimmer as the sun tracked west, and the haze thickened.

  I caught up to Gerhardt. “This weapon. The whole idea that we’re the only ones with a chance to make a difference. You believe that?”

  He stared straight ahead. “It’s the mission.”

  “Sure. But do you believe it? Because I’m getting the sense that maybe you think we’re dead either way.”

  His steady gait became a little less steady. “You’ve got to trust your instincts.”

  “Okay. Are your instincts telling you the Vaulter’s a dead end?”

  His eyes drifted along the building fronts. “We need to get our shit together if we want to make it, Wilson.”

  “Not an answer.”

  “How long you think it would take to cover thirteen klicks?” He glanced back at Hopkins.

  “She’s doped up. We’ve already covered a lot of ground.”

  “Preen’s mostly carrying her.”

  “So we’d have to abandon her? Is that it?”

  “We—”

  I saw it on my BAS at the same time he caught it with his eyes. An armored form staggered out of a storefront, glass scraping beneath its boots. Blood tracked down the front of the Juggernaut torso, which had been cracked like an eggshell right below the sternum. Each step was a grating, twisting sound that almost drowned out the soldier’s wheezing. He was a younger guy, black hair, bronze skin. He should have been dead, crushed by whatever had broken his armor. The blood caked around the corners of his mouth sure hinted at internal bleeding.

  He waved. “Private...Rodriguez.”

  “Shit. Junger’s platoon.” Gerhardt squinted at the kid. “You mobile, Private?”

  “Won’t win any...track meets.”

  Hopkins seemed to cheer up at no longer being the reason for the slowdown. We all knew Rodriguez could drop at any moment. Even he joked about it.

  “If I get slower, don’t...wait for me.” That came out after a fit of vomiting that was mostly dark blood. “Just want a...chance to contribute, right? Watch all your buddies…get blasted from the sky…can’t help but…” He wiggled a middle finger skyward.

  Winged shadows flitted overhead, and the raised finger came down. Croaking, like bullfrogs in heat, bounced inside the concrete valley.

  I’d seen the things on Azure. Scouts. “Croakers. There must be a Leviathan in the area.”

  Gerhardt glanced back at the others. Hopkins nodded, then Rodriguez. We picked up the pace. Preen was gasping before long, and Rodriguez sounded ready to collapse. He didn’t stop to cough up blood but spat it out onto his cracked chest plate. We took a side street, losing the Croakers for a moment. Buildings in the area were mostly squat and square, nothing more than three stories. I passed a brilliant copper racing motorcycle and wished for a second I could just ride it away from all the hopelessness.

  “Weapons crate must be through that alley!” I headed across the street, deserted except for a rusty old fuel truck. It looked surprisingly intact.

  The others followed, but halfway across, I froze.

  Reality twisted. Angles warped and wandered off into infinity. Light crept under shadow, and the ever-present stench of death took on an even nastier texture, like sulfur run through a few fresh flavors—ammonia and chlorine. It was strong enough to bring tears to my eyes and to burn my throat.

  I sealed up and backpedaled across the street with the others, searching for the dark bulk of the Leviathan. It rose up about seventy meters to our right, at the far end of the side street, like a slab of shadow riding on a train of knobby, corpse-white tentacles. The CAWS-5 and grenades felt horribly inadequate.

  Rodriguez held out a hand. “Incendiary!”

  “Won’t do much to—!” I could see by the frown that he didn’t care; I passed him one of my incendiary grenades.

  He staggered toward the fuel truck. “Get to...the Avenger!”

  Gerhardt opened fire on the giant alien. “Hurry!”

  I helped Preen with Hopkins, who seemed ready to pass out. While Rodriguez climbed into the fuel truck cab, Gerhardt laid down enough fire to irritate the Leviathan. The Porcupine rounds were like fireflies sparking on the alien’s impenetrable skin. We had just gotten into the alley when the truck’s engine roared to life. A year after being abandoned, it still worked.

  Gerhardt sprinted into the alley as we exited onto the street with the weapons crate. It showed a pale green on my BAS, but a good look at the crate wiped out any optimism I’d been feeling—cracked, crushed. There was no way the weapon system had survived.

  I scuffed an armored boot over the crumpled concrete. “Busted!”

  That didn’t slow Gerhardt down. He raced past and grabbed the crate’s handle. “Get them inside that building.”

  The only building that looked like it was still structurally sound was the one on the left side of the alley we’d come out of. I waved Preen and Hopkins in through the shattered glass door just as the Leviathan let out another wave of its crazy.

  Shadow washed over everything, sucking away detail and substance. A cold like nothing I’d ever experienced settled in my gut. Nausea doubled me over.

  Then the fuel truck engine roared again and tires chirped.

  Rodriguez! I thought he had died.

  I fell against Preen, who pushed Hopkins forward, into shadow.

  He stopped, blinking dumbly.

  I put a shoulder into his back. “The door’s there. Go!”

  Gerhardt bunched in with us just as the sound of a giant hunk of vehicle crashing into an even larger hunk of alien madness ricocheted outside. Metal twisted with a horrible screeching sound.

  But that was it.

  There’d been enough distance between truck and Leviathan to pick up some speed. Not enough to hurt the beast, but maybe enough to get its attention
.

  I glanced at Gerhardt, barely making him out as he tugged the weapon out of the crate. “Was it empty?”

  He shook his head. “Full.”

  “You think there’d be an—”

  Explosion.

  Not the bone-shaking sort you get with actual explosives. This one was more heat, but there was a definite concussive force as the vapor flash-detonated. Rodriguez must’ve still been alive for a couple seconds, holding down the lever of the incendiary grenade.

  What glass remained in the building shattered, and a moment later the shadows receded.

  Then the unthinkable happened: The Leviathan shrieked.

  There was no other way to describe it. I felt something deep in my head, like an ice pick digging around where skull and spine met. That was almost immediately replaced by a horrific, baby-like scream. If the baby was thirty meters tall.

  The sound twisted the building, warping it into a “U” where the gap was a black hole sucking everything toward it.

  I dropped to my knees. Fighting the Leviathans invited insanity, and it was coming at me like a train hurtling forward at full speed. Rational notions evaporated, burned away by alien thoughts. My awareness became the corrupted impressions it pushed out: desolation, ruin, consumption.

  Someone screamed at me.

  Gerhardt. His eyes…the madness was getting to him, too. He stared at something clutched in his hands, as if it couldn’t exist.

  “Gerhardt! What is it?”

  He couldn’t answer. I took the thing from him and concentrated. A battery. Cracked.

  I glanced out at the street. “The pouch? What about the spare battery pouch?”

  “Crushed.”

  So much for being indestructible. The weapon was intact but powerless. How crazy was that? The mission was a bust because we’d found the one weapon system where the batteries had been destroyed! We’d just seen one where—

  Spare batteries!

  The weapon crate we’d found a couple kilometers back. Nothing had survived. Nothing but the spare batteries!

  Gerhardt seemed stuck in a loop where his mind struggled with such an impossible failure. Preen was curled in a fetal ball, alternately laughing and sobbing. Hopkins’s eyes had rolled up in her head.

  For whatever reason, I was able to handle the Leviathan madness better than most. SS6 called people like me “gifted.” Technically, we had “agile minds.” It meant I got to see the horrors the giant aliens inflicted without going into shock, even without the shielding SS6 had supposedly devised to protect us all.

  Not so great a gift, really.

  But it gave me a chance to do something. The Leviathan would be moving soon, coming for us. I felt its presence growing closer.

  We needed the spare batteries.

  I sprinted for the back of the building, ignoring the curved appearance, running a gloved hand along the wall.

  “Hallway. Straight hallway. Lobby to elevator.”

  The hallway ended in a little indoor courtyard that a bunch of offices opened onto. I shook my head to clear the alien presence telling me it was hopeless. Through an open door, I spotted a destroyed office, and at the back of it, a steel door.

  It had to be open. Had to be.

  I dropped my shoulders and barreled into it. The door came off the hinges.

  For once, the Juggernaut armor lived up to its name.

  I stumbled into the street outside. There were flames everywhere, most of them small and dying out already, but there was no mistaking the black smoke rising from the Leviathan and no missing the way its black mass shivered and its tentacles skittered the bulk away from the smoking wreckage.

  Outrunning the thing wasn’t an option. As big as they were, they could manage twice what I could.

  The motorcycle.

  I ran across the street, through an alley, then another. The motorcycle was there. A HuCorp Mongoose. Fast. No sign of damage. The tank sloshed.

  Travis and I had enjoyed taking bikes onto the mountain trails on Azure. This was more of a performance machine, but I had the basics down. I turned the key, squeezed the clutch—

  Rumbling. The Leviathan presence. It knew I was out in the open.

  I kicked. Nothing. I kicked again and got a little burp.

  The rumbling again. The Leviathan was coming toward me.

  I rolled the bike forward, turned it around, away from the Leviathan. Kicked again.

  Sputtering. It was something.

  Beneath my armored feet, the world shook.

  Don’t look.

  I kicked again, and the engine growled. Oh. My. It growled.

  I put it into gear and let the clutch out and rolled forward.

  Power. So much power. I fought to keep the thing from accelerating too much, leaned into a turn, and nearly wiped out.

  And behind me, the Leviathan seemed to catch on that I wasn’t going to just sit around and wait for it. It surged after me.

  Cat and Mouse. That was the game we played.

  I shot down alleys, or when I was feeling stupid and reckless, I accelerated down ruined streets.

  The Leviathan slithered after me, anticipating what streets I might take and cutting off my options.

  But I tricked it, got onto a straightaway, and opened the engine up.

  Eat my exhaust!

  It was pure luck that I didn’t wipe out when I spotted the ruined crate. My body was vibrating inside my armor, already begging for me to get the bike back onto the straightaway and to test just how fast it could go.

  I grabbed the battery pouch, checked that the spares were inside, and climbed back aboard. The Leviathan was a giant red triangle on my BAS.

  There was no going back the way I’d come. I took the bike down another street, sped a few blocks over, and went back into Cat and Mouse mode. Now that I had a feel for my little suicide machine, I was able to stay a couple steps ahead.

  When I reached the others, Gerhardt was waiting, eyes blinking. “Where the hell’d you go?”

  I held up the battery pouch. “I thought you wanted to wreck this thing?”

  He smiled. “Help me get this up there.”

  We got to the rooftop without issue. But instead of feeling like celebrating when he slipped the battery into place, my heart sank.

  The Leviathan was speeding toward us, crawling down the wide straightaway I’d taken to lose it. Tentacles fluttered from its inhuman head, and unreality rippled all around it, rearranging the shape and size of the buildings as it approached them.

  Gerhardt set the weapon against the rooftop air-conditioning unit and flipped power on. “How long do you think?”

  “A few minutes.”

  “We need to lure it away, or it’s going to crush us.”

  “There’s a van a few klicks back, where I set up the second Avenger.”

  He glanced past me. “Won’t make it back in time.”

  “But I could get it to chase me. You could lead Hopkins and Preen—”

  “Hopkins is about ready to go into shock.”

  She was. “What then?”

  Gerhardt brushed his gloves over his armor. “System’s green. I think it’s searching for the other systems. You sure you had two up?”

  “Absolutely. Doesn’t mean they’re still up.”

  “We need that thing about five kilometers past here.” He pointed west, to where a bunch of cars had been piled up and burned at some point, probably some failed attempt at defense. A couple huge, mangled metal husks were parked near the charred piles. “Those look like tanks. One of them might have a live shell or two.”

  “Didn’t seem to stop whatever broke through the defensive line.”

  “But it might piss the bastard off. Like the fire did.”

  “So what are you proposing, Gerhardt? Because I’m not in the mood to play chicken with that thing. I can draw it away with that Mongoose, but lobbing an artillery round at it isn’t on the menu.”

  “Armor-piercing anti-tank, not artillery. And I’m
not asking you to do anything with the tank.”

  “You’re going to draw it away? How?”

  “Grenades.” He held out a hand. “Give me what you’ve got.”

  “Smoke’s useless, and a couple incendiaries and frags aren’t going to do anything.”

  “Get its attention. That’s all I need.”

  I led him down and gathered the remaining grenades. Before Hopkins or Preen could ask, I raised a hand. “Sergeant Gerhardt’s going to draw the Leviathan off. While he’s doing that, I’m going to make a run for that van, and you two need to head east with me. I’ll swing back and pick you up with the van, then we’ll get Gerhardt and make a run for the Vaulter.”

  Gerhardt cocked an eyebrow and smirked. He had no illusions about needing a ride to the extraction ship.

  Hopkins was too dazed to protest. She took Preen’s hand and leaned against him.

  I led Gerhardt out to the Mongoose. “This thing’s dangerous.”

  “I’ve ridden motorcycles before.”

  “Not like this one. It wants to go fast.”

  He patted the gas tank. “I’ll handle it.”

  The shadows grew darker and deeper; the Leviathan was close.

  I kicked at the scaly asphalt. “These roads are a mess.”

  “I appreciate you caring about me, Ma.” He climbed aboard. “I know what I’m doing.”

  “Your radio’s out. When I get back in range, I’ll fire my weapon.”

  The engine roared to life, and he snorted. “Don’t come looking for me, Sergeant Wilson. I mean it.”

  “Look, I know we haven’t necessarily gotten along, but the ERF needs good NCOs.”

  “They do.” He winked. “And I think they found one.”

  He accelerated down the street and hooked a left, then stopped long enough to fire a burst from his CAWS-5 at the approaching alien. Its fury washed out over the landscape, a sensation like dipping your face into a sewage trench. The Mongoose sped west, and a second later, the earth shook with the Leviathan’s pursuit.

  I cut southeast, away from the monstrosity and the suicidal staff sergeant. The Juggernaut had enough juice in it that I could sprint and make some pretty impressive leaps of my own, even without the Mongoose. Apparently, the Croakers were interested in something to the north. I held out hope—just a little—that it wasn’t the Vaulter and that I could make it to the van. The battery pouch banged against my armored hip. I would have the power to get the vehicle running. It just needed to be operational.