A Fistful of Credits: Stories from the Four Horsemen Universe (The Revelations Cycle Book 5)

by Chris Kennedy

  Charlie’s words were translated for the Jivool through its helmet, which it held in both gargantuan, gauntleted hands.

  “Why didn’t you warn us?!” Carla yelled. “We got wiped out up there!”

  Charlie’s face remained void of emotion.

  “I didn’t know we would be attacked until the attack happened. Then it instantly felt like a replay of a very similar attack. When . . . Bronze Platoon was destroyed.”

  “Bronze Platoon?” Theo said, quickly looking at Carla, who shook her head: she didn’t know anything about it.

  The Jivool spat some growling, deep-throated consonants and vowels which churned out the other end of Theo’s helmet speakers as, “How can we trust that this is the truth?”

  “That passageway,” Charlie said, aiming the arm of his CASPer in the direction of a long, dark corridor which branched off from the pressure lock holding area in which they now huddled. “I know it has three more passageways branching at its end. Two of which are sealed. One is open. The Jivool has been here, too. He can attest to this.”

  Theo and Carla looked at their alien companion.

  The big bear’s upper lip quivered slightly, then he spat more consonants and vowels.

  “That is correct. During my initial reconnaissance of this place, I discovered the passageways as your cyborg has described. Though I detected nothing of prior Human habitation. This structure was not created by Human hands, nor by Human minds.”

  “That’s because it is . . . it is . . .”

  Charlie’s face pinched with an expression of frustration—the first time he had shown any emotion at all.

  “I am sorry,” he finally said. “I can feel the memory. It is there. But I cannot call it to the surface.”

  “Maybe if we keep moving,” Theo said, “it’ll come back to you. We obviously can’t stay here.”

  As a group, they moved out. With the Jivool leading the way, followed by Carla, then Theo, and Charlie trailing behind. Occasionally, Charlie’s face would pinch with renewed frustration, and he would stop for a moment, his lips moving to form noiseless sounds. Then his face would resume an expressionless mask, and he would begin walking again—the boots of his CASPer clanking noisily alongside the racket made by the others.

  “What is he?” the Jivool asked as they walked.

  “We were told Charlie was a prototype,” Theo said. “He dropped with us as a form of ‘field test’ but that’s all I was told. I had no idea he was . . . fully integrated like he is. There seems to be precious little of his original body left. I don’t know why a genuine cyborg conversion was necessary.”

  “Maybe the part we see is the only part that made it,” Carla said. “If he’s right, he must be the only survivor from a prior contract dispatched to this world.”

  “Yeah, but why the hell keep us in the dark during mission prep?” Theo asked. “If they put a whole platoon here before, and lost the manpower, it makes no sense that we—Blue, Gold, Green—didn’t know about this disaster beforehand. Certainly Chief Wixton should have known about it. And while he can be a pain in the ass, I don’t think he’s the kind of man who’d ever hold out on us.”

  “If the channel to orbit wasn’t still blocked, we could ask Silver Falcon.”

  “If Silver Falcon knew about this…well, I am not going to make any assumptions. I just want to…whoa!”

  The group suddenly stopped short, along a stretch of corridor which had opened up on one side, showing a magnificently-sized subterranean hall of columns. The forest of curiously-shaped pillars stretched into the dim distance, illuminated only by their CASPers’ lights.

  “Like a giant-sized Greek temple,” Theo remarked.

  “How deep are we, anyway?” Carla whispered to no one in particular, as she stared into the far distance.

  “At least 300 of your meters,” the Jivool said. “And there are spaces beneath us, much larger still. I had only just begun to explore them all when my system began to weakly detect your comm signals above. I rushed back the way we came in time to open the top-most outer door and see your Blue Platoon being destroyed.”

  Charlie stared out at the titanic columns.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Carla said.

  “Boosters,” Charlie simply replied.

  “Come again?” Theo asked.

  “They are not what they at first seem to be,” Charlie said. “Each cylinder is in fact a launch silo. Almost all of them are empty. But a few are not.”

  “Launch silo?” the Jivool said. “For what, precisely?”

  “Ground-to-orbit craft,” Charlie said.

  “How do you know this?” the alien growled.

  “I know it, because it’s the way I got back to orbit the first time. I am just now remembering. Only . . . only . . .”

  Charlie’s pinched expression was pronounced, as he looked down at the floor.

  “Goddamit,” Theo said, “What happened?”

  Charlie looked up, his eyes suddenly filled with an intense pain. Small drops of fluid leaked from his eyelids, and ran unnoticed down his scarred face.

  “The creatures . . . they only wounded me. It was the ride back into orbit which killed me.”

  “You mean almost killed you?”

  “No. Killed. My CASPer was wrecked, and almost out of power. By the time I got down here, I had to abandon it. I found and climbed a gantry next to one of the silos. Up on top, I found a way to unlatch the door to the inside, which in turn took me to an empty payload bay. When I closed the payload bay hatch, the craft initiated an automated launch sequence. The G forces were…they were…I should be dead.”

  “I can’t believe pre-Union technology would survive so long and still be working,” Carla said. “I mean, I’m not a brain like Theo, but even I know machinery breaks down eventually, no matter how sophisticated it might be.”

  “Do not underestimate what the elder races were capable of,” the Jivool grumbled. “Even my species, which has had much more time to study them, does not understand everything about the pre-Union era. We only know there was a great war, fought with terrible weapons of amazing power and scale. Not all of these weapons were destroyed at the war’s end. Perhaps this whole underground complex is merely a giant missile battery, to be used to surprise an enemy space fleet?”

  “But why put your battery at the bottom of a pressure-cooker hell-hole?” Theo asked.

  “What better place to hide such a battery?” the Jivool said. “It would be the last place any sane species would think to check. War can turn desperation into brilliance.”

  “Well, yeah. Brilliance that doesn’t help us at all, if what Charlie says is true. Even if we can find one of these vehicles intact and get it to launch like Charlie says, we won’t fare any better than he did.”

  “We have the CASPers,” Carla said. “Charlie didn’t have his. Not the first time.”

  “I’m still not even sure I buy Charlie’s story,” Theo said. “What reason would the Company have had to land Blue Platoon here in the first place? Knowing we were being sent into a death trap? Even if Silver Falcon is a suit, he’s not a cold fish. The Company doesn’t throw away its people like that.”

  Charlie was now leaning against the corridor wall, punching a gauntlet into the wall over, and over, and over again.

  “I am dead…I am not dead…I am dead…I am not dead,” he said, repeatedly.

  “He’s in hell,” Carla said quietly so only Theo could hear. Or so she thought.

  Charlie suddenly whirled around and glared at them. His whole face was pink, as well as moist.

  “I am the ghost of a man who should not have lived!” he yelled, his mechanized throat making a digital warbling sound as he shouted the words. “I cannot remember who I really am! I cannot remember why I was really here! I cannot…I cannot…I cannot…

  Charlie sank slowly to his knees, his fists balled on either side of each hip, while tears ran freely from eyes which were clenched shut.

  “Come on,” Th
eo urged quietly. “Let’s go see if there are any full silos which might help us.”

  * * *

  The search took hours as they wandered from one stupendously-sized column to the next. And the next. And the next. It was difficult to keep track. Every silo looked the same. And the few times Carla or Theo or the Jivool climbed a gantry, they discovered the interior had been left empty.

  Then, as Theo began to worry about their CASPer power supplies running low, they stumbled across something remarkable.

  It was another CASPer, an older Mk 7. Even more battered than their own. Lying on the ground, its cockpit locked open. Its power had died long ago, but there was still a name stenciled on the CASPer’s shattered breast plate.

  “Broussard,” Theo said, reverently reaching out with his gauntleted hands to attach a suit-to-suit connection. He didn’t have enough power to do much more than reawaken the abandoned suit’s computer, but it was the only real chance they’d had so far to get some concrete answers.

  Within a few moments, the surviving data in the abandoned suit had been transferred to Theo’s. He closed his cockpit and used the Tri-V displays to quickly cycle through the abandoned suit’s log file.

  “Your name is…Christopher Broussard,” Theo pronounced. “You were Chief Broussard, in charge of Bronze Platoon, which landed on Echo Tango Six approximately…four Earth years ago. Plus or minus a couple of months. You were sent to discover if rumors of an F11 deposit were true and found this pre-Union installation instead. The creatures on the surface attacked just prior to you broadcasting your findings. You were the only survivor.”

  Charlie Bravo stood motionless, his mouth silently repeating the name Theo had spoken. The former chief was lost in his own world.

  Carla pulled Theo aside, with the Jivool in hearing range.

  “I still can’t figure it out, though,” she said.

  “Which part?” Theo asked dryly. “There are several.”

  “This place,” she said, spinning on a heel, her arms outstretched. “How could any race construct this complex, when the surface is lethal in several different ways?”

  “You mean the things?”

  “Them, and the environment.”

  The Jivool had a thought.

  “Perhaps the pre-Unionists brought the creatures with them. A form of feral life which, bred in an environment similar to this, might thrive? And provide a natural, active defense against intruders once the silo system had been installed? That way the weapons are triple-protected against outsiders. A near guarantee that nobody could deactivate or disable the battery. If the pressure does not crush an expedition, the temperature will cook it. All else becomes food for the things.”

  “They wanted this!” Charlie—Chief Broussard—suddenly shouted.

  “What?” Theo said, quickly walking back to the cyborg’s side.

  “I’m getting it. Now. The tornado of fragments in my head…it’s slowing down. The Company…they didn’t know what they had down here; they just knew it was something very, very important. Something they could use. Maybe sell? Maybe reverse-engineer? Biological or technological, it didn’t matter. We—my platoon—never sent up a full report. We only gave them images of the pressure door to the underground. Back in orbit, a few days later, they had my corpse, and the pre-Union spacecraft which launched me. An almost irresistible mystery.”

  “But why send you back?” the Jivool asked. “And in such a compromised condition after so much delay?”

  “And not tell us about it,” Carla reemphasized.

  “I don’t know,” the cyborg admitted.

  Theo looked around at the nearby silos. “There is one sure way to find out.”

  * * *

  The payload bay contained no visible controls. No readouts. No Tri-V devices. Nothing to indicate the bay could be used to control the functioning of the ancient spacecraft in any meaningful way. If and when it finally went up, Theo, Carla, Broussard, and the Jivool merc survivor would be purely at the mercy of its wholly unknown programming.

  Assuming the launch didn’t fail halfway.

  Or bust apart right there in the tube itself.

  Lacking couches, straps, crash nets, or anything else to secure themselves to the bare metal deck, the two Humans, one alien, and one cyborg simply laid down on their backs, with their cockpits closed and helmet fastened, while Theo reached over and manually pulled the hatch shut. Which left them in complete darkness—there were no portholes—to contemplate their ultimate fate.

  When several moments passed with no light, or any sound, Carla began to grouse.

  “We picked a dud,” she said. “Just our luck.”

  “I don’t even know if we can get the hatch back open,” Theo muttered.

  “Wait,” the Jivool suddenly said. “Can you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” Theo asked.

  “Hang on!” Broussard shouted.

  Theo was suddenly flattened to the deck, his system’s speakers blooping little alarm noises at him, regarding the sudden and stiff amount of acceleration he was experiencing. An ordinary trip to orbit might subject a Human to three or four Gs, at the very most. But when the CASPer detected force in excess of twelve Gs, it was programmed to know the occupant was in serious danger of not only blacking out, but suffering permanent physical damage, or even death.

  Nobody could say anything. Or scream. They simply lay where they were, practically cemented to the floor by the raw power of the motors working beneath them. Motors which had been built an untold number of years ago, and which had sat in undisturbed stasis for this one moment—when four refugees would use the craft to blast their way up out of the cauldron of Echo Tango Six, and back into blissful, cold, empty space.

  Where Silver Falcon was waiting for them.

  * * *

  Theo vaguely remembered coming to. He hurt. All of him hurt. His vision was blurred. His ears were ringing. And his stomach was unhappy to be introduced to microgravity so quickly after having been pancaked across the bottom of the pre-Union booster’s payload bay.

  It took many minutes for all three Humans aboard—even the man who was mostly a machine—to get their wits about them.

  Outside? Impossible to tell what was happening. Since the craft had no windows and there were no display panels with which to discern what might be happening, they simply had to wait. And wait. And wait.

  Until, at last, they felt the gentle nudging on the hull which told them somebody or something had come along to secure them. Probably a small boat from the Company mother craft.

  More waiting.

  Until the hatch was cut open—Human torches, very noisy and bright—and a squad of space-suited techs popped in.

  “Please tell me nobody was stupid enough to send down Gold or Green,” Theo wheezed, as he was carried in his CASPer out of the ship.

  “No,” said one of the techs. “Silver Falcon was gnawing a fist off, trying to decide what to do, when we picked up the booster over the planet’s pole. It took a bit of work to intercept you, but now that you’re back, I can assure you, nobody will go back down to the surface until Silver Falcon gets a full report.”

  “The Jivool—”

  “We’ll take care of the alien. He might represent our rivals, but he also presents an opportunity to perhaps win a few points with those very same rivals. Who knows? There may come a time when we’re working the same contract, on the same side.”

  * * *

  Silver Falcon’s master suite was luxuriously decorated with all the best Earth accoutrements money could buy, including a huge natural rock water fountain which took up practically one whole wall—and was made possible only by the spinning torus that looped around the Company mother craft’s main body that ran centerline through the torus’s middle.

  Ridiculous and gaudy, Theo thought. Especially for a man who’d worked his way up from being a shovel head in the front ranks.

  But then, maybe that was the point? Maybe to remind people—or even himself—j
ust how far Bufordson had come in his 67 years of life.

  Theo and Carla were seated in front of Silver Falcon’s desk. At their side, riding on a robotic carriage, was Chief Broussard. Removed from his former CASPer, he seemed to be regaining his memory at a rapid clip, now that he was back in familiar territory and seeing familiar faces.

  Especially Silver Falcon’s.

  “You goddamned prick,” Broussard said, putting as much emotion into his vocoded voice as he could.

  Silver Falcon merely cleared his throat uncomfortably and looked at his former top chief, who had commanded his former top platoon.

  “It was nothing personal, Chris,” Silver Falcon said. “When they found you in orbit the first time, they told me you were too far gone. Except that some of your memory might be saved if we acted quickly. I demurred. Once they had what was left of your brain tied into the basic cybernetics, though…well, you were a drooling idiot. I told them to pull the plug. It would be cruel to let you linger like that. Except you kept remembering little nuggets, here and there, to the point that the psych people told me that association was the key to you getting it all back. Sights. Sounds. Smells. Even getting you back to the actual world where it all occurred in the first place.”

  “So, you used me like a piece of meat?”

  “Who was stone dead when we found him, yes.”

  “Would you use one of your own kids in the same way?”

  “Dammit, Chris, that’s not fair! You were dead. I told them initially to let you stay that way. Alright? They kept telling me, ‘Oh no, there’s something there still, it’s not really the person, but we might get some details.’”

  “Why not immediately go back down to the surface?” Theo asked.

  “Where my best platoon vanished without a trace?” Silver Falcon said, somewhat incredulously. “Young man, you may not realize it, but losing an entire platoon with no answers put me in a terrible position with my superiors in the Company. There had to be an accounting, and they weren’t going to spend any more blood or treasure on the matter until that accounting was given. They washed their hands of Echo Tango Six…until the Zuparti client came along, and gave the Company a sufficient financial incentive to go back.”