He collapsed beside Smythe as the last of the Ghosts fell. With the playful brutality of a cat toying with a mouse, Smythe let the wounded Ghost crawl a short distance. Then she double-tapped it.
“Now I feel better,” she said. “Except I think these vines are like poison ivy or something. My legs are itching.”
No sooner had she said it than Colm’s hands started to itch, too. He scratched them, then pushed up the cuffs of his leathers to scratch his wrists. Smythe’s eyes were a bit too bright, and Colm knew he’d better distract her from the fact that she had just massacred two dozen things that looked like people. He took the physical comedy up a notch, scratching his scalp and his arse. ”I fucking love colony worlds,” he groaned.
Smythe chortled. “This one’s a beaut, all right. Did you hear about the venomous turtles that climb trees? And the flightless birds with a bite as strong as a hippo?” She narrowed her eyes at Colm. “Actually, Collie Mack, what’s that around your neck?”
Colm had forgotten about the talking carpet. He’d got so used to its warm weight around his neck, it felt like it belonged there. But it hadn’t talked recently. Maybe it was dead. “It’s a scarf, isn’t it?”
“It’s girly. Also, you stole it.”
“I am a fucking Scot; we wear skirts. A scarf is nothing. Also, stealing is in the DNA. Be glad I didn’t take a cow.”
Away in the fields, the gunship launched, rising vertically on twin needles of blue fire.
“Speaking of stealing,” Colm said in disbelief. He clamped down on the panic he felt at watching his ship leave without him.
“There go my plans for the weekend,” Smythe said, staring in a trance at the gunship.
“All is not lost,” Colm said, over the scream of hypersonic exhaust two klicks away. “We can hike out of here.” Smythe didn’t even have shoes on. “Hide from the Ghosts. Recharge your suit when the sun comes up.” In two days’ time. “Radio for an emergency pickup ...”
He trailed off.
The gunship was swooping towards them.
As Smythe had said, they’d been losing a lot of ships. Better to ditch a few warm bodies than a seven-figure hunk of technology. That’s how the Rat would see it, so Colm could imagine that he’d procured software to enable an unmanned launch to orbit. It might have kicked in after the presumed-dead timer expired.
But low-level flying? Skimming the treetops? You couldn’t do that with automation. There had to be a pilot at the controls.
“Stage Three,” Smythe shouted. “I told you!”
Colm didn’t want to believe it.
The gunship hovered over the helipad. It descended, jockeying back and forth. Lower, lower. Colm and Smythe clamped their hands over their ears. Plasma exhaust carpeted the helipad with blue fire. The battlesuits of the dead Marines glowed dull cherry red. The dead Ghosts first caught on fire, and then evaporated into pink steam. Wind whipped the tree Colm and Smythe were sheltering beneath, showering them with leaves and twigs.
The drive cut out at last. The ship settled onto its jacks with a bang and a bounce. The starboard wing scraped the cliff. Colm winced. His esthesia was still inoperative, but that landing had hurt just to look at.
Smythe sighted along her combi at the gunship, her face bloodless, knuckles white.
The airlock opened. The steps clattered down.
Two battlesuited Marines hurtled out of the airlock. Each took a knee at the bottom the steps, facing in opposite directions. Two more troopers disembarked and knelt behind them.
Smythe scrambled to her feet. Colm grabbed for her arm, too late. She yelled and waved gladly at the Marines. Colm felt a pang of apprehension. He didn’t know exactly what, but something was very wrong here..
The Marines swivelled towards Smythe’s voice. For a second Colm was looking straight into their guns.
An older man appeared at the top of the airlock steps, wearing the spartan tunic and trousers that had been status gear for Majriti IV’s elite. “Gilliam?” he shouted. ”Gilliam Tripsilion Nulth?”
The talking carpet flexed around Colm’s neck. In a small, tired voice, it said, “Here I am.”
CHAPTER 6
IT HAD NOT BEEN Ghosts flying the gunship. It had been Captain Axel Best, the officer in command of the two lost platoons. So something was wrong here, just not what Colm had feared.
“I have only four troopers left,” Best said, grinding the words out without a hint of emotion. “It was not safe to hang out at the LZ. Hell, this ship is two gigawatts of Ghost bait.”
The remnant of Best’s company had rescued 26 civilians from Drumlin Farm. They had been waiting in the forest. Bekkelund must’ve walked straight past them in the dark, and Smythe and Colm had followed him, missing them again. A front-lines comedy of errors, with fatal consequences.
“I lost my copilot looking for you. One radio transmission could’ve saved his life,” Colm said aggressively, relieved to be safely back on board, and hating himself a bit for that.
Best said, “We had no comms.” He stared at Colm until Colm broke eye contact.
No comms, my arse. Colm knew why Best had not radioed. He’d done exactly what panicked civilians often did when Ghosts were about—switch everything off, go dark, in hopes that the Ghosts would not find them. According to what the surviving Marines had said to Smythe, Best had even made them power down their battlesuits and walk all that deadweight to the gunship, one staggering step at a time. 250-pound juicers could do that. A 130-pound woman could not. It was a pain point for Smythe and many other female soldiers.
And someone else sitting in his cockpit was a pain point for Colm.
Especially when that someone was Captain Axel Best. Best embodied everything that got on Colm’s nerves about the Marines—the swagger, the superiority complex, the disregard for the Navy that supported their missions. On top of that he was the son of Philip K. Best, the space industry mogul who owned half of the asteroid belt.
Colm had never tangled with Best one-on-one before, but he knew of him, as everyone on the Unsinkable did. He’d always felt vaguely sorry for him. The guy had joined up at O-1 level, determined to prove himself the hard way, but he could not escape the reverse stigma of his family’s wealth.
Now, Colm’s sympathy evaporated. Best had lost 80% of his men by not calling in this emergency in a timely manner. He had got Bekkelund killed by going dark. And then, insult to injury, he’d called up the Unsinkable and received an authentication override so that he could make off with Colm’s ship. His name was the ultimate password phrase, and when his toes were in the fire he had not scrupled to use it.
Now Colm wanted his ship back.
He stood in the gunmetal cave of the cockpit, drinking from his thermos of Irn Bru, yearning for the return of his 360° vision. All he could see of the ship’s surroundings was the patch of helipad on the main screen. He would not know if sparks started wriggling away from the ship’s reactor. He waited impatiently for Best to get up.
“You know, I used to fly gliders on Mars,” Best said.
“Yeah?” Colm said. “I used to fly business jets on Earth.” Mine’s bigger than yours.
Best’s jaw bunched. “Why don’t you go settle the civilians? I want them strapped in for takeoff in five.”
“In five ...” Colm had assumed Best would take his surviving men to recover the bodies of the dead soldiers, including Bekkelund.
“I’m informed that some of the civilians require medical attention. Both my platoon medics were KIA.” No emotion colored Best’s words. “You’re qualified as a medic, aren’t you?”
All company-grade officers had to get a medical qualification, meaning that Best had as much training as Colm had. “Yes,” Colm said. “Are you qualified as a pilot?”
“Sure am.”
“Got an implant?”
Best colored slightly. Colm guessed that meant no. Best must not have scored high enough on his pilot’s exams to qualify for an esthesia implant. But he said, “Of cour
se I have an implant.”
Colm raised his eyebrows: prove it.
Best’s color deepened. “Go and assist the fucking civilians! That’s an order, Lieutenant Mackenzie.”
Colm saluted and limped out of the cockpit.
Chaos swirled in the crew cabin. Best’s rescuees—odds and sods from Drumlin Farm—sat stunned on the metal floor, or picked hopelessly through emergency rations and blankets. Kids screamed hysterically, ignored by traumatized adults. Colm picked up a crying toddler. “Where’s your mam, little lass?” He made a funny face at her. She only wept louder and wriggled like a fresh-caught salmon.
“Her mother is dead,” a voice said. It was the older man who’d taken the crazy risk of showing himself on the gunship’s steps. Lines of exhaustion marked a tanned face beneath expensive silver hair. “Come to Tio Emile, sweetheart.”
Colm handed the child over. She quieted in the man’s arms, which Colm took as a sign of trustworthiness. “I’m very sorry for your losses, sir. Can you tell them to sit down and strap in? They’ll have to place the smaller children beside them. We’re going straight into orbit, so we’ll experience up to three Gs for a short period of time.” It seemed crazy to take all these civilians up to the Unsinkable, but Best had said those were his orders, so what did Colm know?
“I understand,” the man said, holding it together admirably. Together, they coaxed the survivors into the acceleration couches. Smythe and the Marines sat together at the end of the cabin.
“All secure,” Colm said to Best on the radio, fastening his own harness. The jump couches lined both walls of the cabin, facing forward, so it was like sitting in a crowded train carriage. Colm kept getting shocks of wrongness—he shouldn’t be riding back here, he should be up front, and why couldn’t he feel anything?
Without any warning from Best, the couches swung on their gimbals and flattened out, so their occupants would be lying on their backs with respect to the ship’s thrust vector. The pumps rumbled, shoving the molten salt from the reactor core to the Peltier converter. The muffled screech of the drive scaled up to a resonant howl. Best opened the throttle.
Gravity settled on their bodies like a cement quilt. Launch to orbit in a military gunship was not a five-star flying experience at the best of times, and Best was making it even harder than it had to be, riding the throttle like a teenage stunt jockey. He probably did have an implant, but it would be a consumer model. Even high-end consumer implants—such as those made by Best Industries—lacked the responsiveness of the military version.
As the gees built, Colm bit the inside of his mouth, thinking about the children. Their crying had been bad; their sudden silence was worse. It reminded him of the silence in that red passage.
As soon as gravity lost its grip, he popped his harness and flew around the cabin, checking on them.
He needn’t have worried. Despite all the trauma they had suffered, the magic of freefall beguiled them. Within moments, they were bouncing off the walls of the cabin, giggling and chasing each other around.
“They are resilient,” said the older man sadly, floating out of his own couch. He rotated right way up to Colm with a fingertip push off the ceiling. “I am Emile Zaragoza. Thank you for rescuing us.”
The irony of being thanked for this mess bit deep. Colm let it pass without comment. “The captain said you had some people who required medical attention? We’re now in orbit, but it will be a few hours before we dock with the Unsinkable, so if it’s urgent, I can have a look at them.”
Zaragoza grimaced. “I don’t know if it’s urgent or not. And I don’t know if there is anything you can do for him. I suppose you might as well examine him, if he’ll let you.” He pointed at the gunship’s sickbay, a narrow door in the aft wall.
Jesus. The patient had been in there while they were launching to orbit? Hopefully someone had at least strapped him in. “Got it.” Colm pushed off from a seatback.
As he flew down the cabin, a globule of watery puke wobbled into his path. Freefall might be a magical experience for kids, but it had its downside, as Colm knew from the times he’d flown tourists on sub-orbital thrill rides back on Earth. He yelled, “Smythe, clean that up.”
The door of sickbay closed behind him, shutting out most of the noise.
The gurney was vacant.
Confused, Colm looked around the closet-sized space.
A ball of fox-colored fur floated in the corner of the ceiling.
“Go away,” it said faintly.
His talking carpet.
Gilliam Tripsilion Nulth.
CHAPTER 7
EMILE ZARAGOZA HAD SNATCHED the talking carpet away from Colm as soon as they boarded. If Colm had thought about the thing after that, he had concluded it was just some kind of valuable alien pet. But it seemed to be more than that.
“Mr. Zaragoza said you might need help,” he said cautiously.
“Professor Zaragoza is a clueless fantasist,” the carpet whined.
Colm hid a smile, although that wasn’t the impression he’d got of the man.
“My life’s work has been futile. Go away and let me die.”
Colm had been through a lot tonight. The words Awright; fuck yersel’ then sprang to the tip of his tongue. But compassion won. The carpet may not be a pet, but it was small and furry and needed help. It reminded him of Sprite, the long-haired Abyssinian cat he’d had as a child. “Come here.” He floated up and tentatively took hold of the creature. It quivered in his grasp, but allowed him to lay it on the gurney.
Stretched out, it no longer looked like a carpet. Or like a cat. Rather, it put Colm in mind of a five-foot caterpillar. It had feet—at least eight of them that he could see, hidden in the fur, curled up like bird’s claws—or maybe they were wee hands. A graceful black muzzle poked out of what was presumably the head end. Ferret, caterpillar, Pekingese ... none of the terrestrial comparisons quite fit.
Colm licked his lips. An honest-to-God alien.
At least sixteen intelligent alien species were known to humanity, but no one had ever met any of them except for the sentrienza, who liaised with the Human Republic. Colm had tangled with weird and wonderful alien beasties galore, but this was different.
It talked.
It was wounded.
Get on with it, Mackenzie.
He jammed his toes into the tethers on the floor. Now that they were in freefall, he didn’t have to put any weight on his bad leg. He fixed the restraints across the alien’s furry body. “I’m going to run the scanner. It’s non-invasive, you won’t feel a thing.”
“I hurt,” the alien said plaintively.
“Well, no wonder,” Colm said, watching the screen as the scanner built up a 3D image of the alien’s insides. “You’ve been shot.” He could not make head nor tail of the daisy-chained organs—three stomachs?!—but gunshot wounds unfortunately looked the same across all species. “I don’t see any catastrophic internal bleeding.” The bullet seemed to have passed through the alien’s midsection without hitting anything vital. However, blood matted the fur around the entry and exit wounds. The alien must have suffered significant blood loss.
A human would be in hypovolemic shock at this point. The alien seemed to be talking and breathing normally. Colm wouldn’t know where to begin looking for its pulse or taking its temperature, but it seemed best to be on the safe side. “I’m going to give you oxygen.” He prepped an oxygen mask.
“Have you no medication?”
“I don’t know the first thing about your physiology. Our medications might kill you.”
“I have been on Majriti IV for two years. I am familiar with the most commonly used human medications. Synthetic opiates, for instance tropodolfin, are effective for me.”
Colm’s eyes widened. Tropo was hard stuff. Even on a gunship, it had to be kept locked up, or troopers would steal it out of the medical locker. “I’m not confident of getting the dosage right,” he hedged. ”I’d rather just give you a fluid IV with something
to stimulate red blood cell production. Are you OK with erythropoietin?”
“I do not know,” the alien said. “I’ve never been shot before!” Its growly, somewhat lisping voice sounded fainter. Maybe it was in shock.
The oxygen mask would not come close to fitting over its long nose. Colm improvised with an empty IV bag and surgical tape, while the alien glared at him with round, lustrous black eyes. At least with the bag over its muzzle it couldn’t complain.
In silence, he cleaned the entry and exit wounds and applied sterile bandages. Then he checked the long body for other wounds, brushing away leaf fragments and dirt as he went. Just like brushing Sprite’s fur after she’d been out in the garden ... But the likeness seemed less compelling than it had a few minutes ago. After all, this was not an animal. It was a ... a what?
“What are you?” he murmured, half to himself. “I’ve never seen anything like you, even on screen.”
The alien raised its two foremost paws—claws? hands?—and lifted the makeshift oxygen mask away from its face. “I am a queazel, of course.”
“A ... a what?”
“A queazel.”
“Are you native to Majriti IV?” Of course it wasn’t. If there were any intelligent lifeforms in the Upsilon Andromedae A system, the sentrienza wouldn’t have allowed humanity to colonize the place.
“Certainly not. Queazels are native to the fifth planet of Uzizzriat, a G-type star several thousand light years from here. However, I have never been there. I was born on Juradis, the third habitable planet orbiting a star known to humanity as—”
“Betelgeuse,” Colm finished. He gazed at the queazel in awe.
Betelgeuse lay 642 light years from Earth, a bit less from here. Colm had heard of Juradis. It was supposed to be a hub of sentrienza civilization. But few humans had ever ventured that far. The journey took two years each way and cost a fortune—serious barriers to travel, even if humanity had not been embroiled in a war.
Yet the queazel had made that prodigious journey in the other direction. On what ship? Whose ship? And why? “What were you doing on Majriti IV?”
The Chemical Mage: Supernatural Hard Science Fiction (The Tegression Trilogy Book 1) Page 4
