by Dan Davis
“Here they come again,” Sergeant Stirling shouted from the firing line.
About half the wheelers flipped themselves upright, into the familiar wheel configuration, and accelerated. Two to three meters tall, their six legs jutting out of the central hub, aligned along a single axis and ending in wide, flat feet that were so close they almost touched each other to make a continuous rim. Two long, bony arms ending in a hand with three long fingers, each finger with a murderous claw. Even rolling over, they could fire the weapons clutched in those hands. In the upright, wheel configuration they could move quickly and efficiently. Charging the jagged and torn hole where the Marines stood, charging to force their way into the outpost.
Ram put his hand on his hilt but stayed back behind the cover of the wall. The firing had not let up.
The Marines cut them down. Their rifles firing on rapid bursts. The Marines churned through their ammo, changing magazines rapidly. Out in front, the wheelers fell to the accurate, concentrated fire. Ram noted that every Marine fired at oblique angles, shooting across the front of the one beside them and he knew, somehow, that this was UNOP Marine Corps doctrine for firing on the wheelers when in wheel configuration. The huge footpads that created a continuous rim, and the legs that formed the spokes, were an effective barrier. That was why the Marines shot into the hub, diagonally. The hub was surely the center of the wheelhunter nervous system and a few rounds into that hub would put them down, he knew.
And the wheelers fell.
They were hit and they went down in jumbles of limbs, collapsing and rolling with momentum.
But not all of them. For every one that went down when it was hit, two more kept coming.
It was obvious that, despite the withering fire, the enemy would make it to the breach.
Ram wished they had issued him his primary weapon. The Marines in front of him had no machine gunner and no heavy weapons as far as he could see. All he could do was watch as the surviving wheelers got closer. Many had gunshot wounds to the legs or feet but it did not seem to even slow them down.
He recalled the wounds on the wheeler in the Orb Arena, punching it and wrestling with it, breaking its limbs, stamping on one of the six legs so powerfully that it snapped under his foot and still the monster would not stop fighting, would not stop slashing him with its enormous claws. Ram felt those claws, tearing his face, felt his guts being pulled from his body, stepping on them as he struggled on to the--
“Fall back!” Ensign Tseng shouted. The order was repeated by Sergeant Stirling and a few of the others.
The Marines in the room retreated. Stirling dragged one of the wounded Marines already downed.
Two Marines stayed at the breach to cover them, still firing.
More than half of the charging wheelers, more than ten of the nightmare creatures, reached the remnants of the outpost wall and clambered over like it was nothing, climbing like gigantic black spiders. The final pair of Marines fell back to their comrades, ducking low under the firing from the rear and corners of the room.
Too late. Both Marines were struck down before they took three steps. The aliens knife blades spearing them and dragging them back into the writhing black mass while the Marines screamed.
Those first wheelers were shot to pieces, collapsing into bundles of gigantic, twitching black-clad limbs while their comrades behind followed, climbing into the awesome firepower of the UNOP Marine Corps.
Ram stayed standing behind the pair of Marines on his side of the room where they kneeled together in the corridor behind a low barricade, firing rapidly, changing their dwindling magazines expertly, alternating so their firing was continuous. For a few moments, Ram thought they were holding the enemy.
But the aliens got closer and closer before they fell.
The wounded Marine at Ram’s feet, the one who had been handing out mags to his team mates before the sergeant had pulled him out, reached up and pounded on Ram’s calf.
“Sir. Can’t you fucking do something?”
What do you want me to do?
Ram showed the man his hands. “No gun.”
The Marine held up his sidearm.
“Can’t,” Ram said, showing the man his hands. “Finger’s too big. For trigger guard.”
“Look out!”
A wheeler leaped from the crowd, eating fire as it came toward them but its momentum carrying it on through. It careened into the Marines in front of him, knocking them flying.
Ram acted without thought, slamming his shoulder into the sprawling alien to stop it crushing the Marines. The weight of the thing was enormous and yet, like that last one he had killed, it was smaller than the Orb alien. The realization was a joyful one.
I am stronger than you.
One of its three-fingered hands swung in from nowhere and smacked Ram on the back of his helmet, dazing him despite the armor’s shock absorbers. A massive leg smashed the side of his knee and he fell, arms flailing like an idiot, grasping blindly at the limbs thrashing about all around him. The tactical scabbard almost tripped him and the dying alien thumped him again.
A deep anger boiled up and he drew his sword and drove it up into the wheeler’s hub, thrusting halfway to the crossguard. Ram’s comms system filled with static, a burst so loud that it hurt, before the suit’s audio system compensated and backed off the volume. Pushing the alien off the blade a little, he drew it out and plunged it back in, the point snicking through the black suit and thick yellow skin beneath and on into the hub’s guts and viscera. Blood smeared across his visor but the monster fell still and Ram withdrew his sword, taking a deep, shuddering breath.
Someone was shouting but he did not hear what it was. He wiped the red alien blood from his visor.
The outpost room, open to the planet’s atmosphere, crawled with a mass of wheelers, climbing closer to him.
“Get down!” That was what they were shouting. “Get down, sir, get down now.”
He dropped, folding his giant body into a crouch and hunkering down. The Marines opened up, firing over his back into the mass of wheelers. Blood sprayed and his ears filled with static and his vision blurred. One of the rifles fell silent, the other a few seconds after. Ram ducked down again as their sidearms were fired empty.
Glancing round to make sure he was not stepping into danger, Ram jumped upright, gripped his sword tight and clambered over the fallen wheeler at his feet.
Beyond, the others writhed in blood and smoke, dazed and shot but unfolding themselves, rising and threatening to attack once more. Ram had to hurry, hit them before they recovered.
He swung his sword at the nearest waving leg, pulled his weapon back along the cut to slice a great gouge out of it. The hub shuddered and the leg twitched away but Ram advanced, cutting and stabbing at anything within reach. He smashed an alien hand aside before it could fire the pistol it held, he kicked forward and thrust his way into the mass, slipping and stumbling as he hacked down and all around. His ears filled with static and his heart raced in his chest, almost immediately sweating hard, his suit’s cooling system whirring all over. His AugHud was completely dead, granting him no data about himself or the outside world, squinting through the visor smeared with dark blood as he advanced. Some were dead by the time he got to them, felled by the Marines. Others he finished off with a thrust.
A few fought like the devil but he fought harder, parrying their attacks and cutting them down. He lost himself in the fight, reacting with instinct instead of conscious thought. He listened, amazed, to the sound of someone roaring a wordless cry of animal rage before he realized that it was him who was roaring.
The pressure eased and his victims thinned. His blade found dead and dying targets. Spinning about, wanting more despite the burning ache in his arms and shoulders and back from the exertion, he found the Marines advancing to his position, each armed with their bloodied combat knives, finishing off any twitching monsters. The static faded and the Marine’s voices sounded in his ears.
They were c
heering.
Ram wiped his visor more thoroughly and looked out at the planet. Through the drifting smoke, blue sky above and black hills beyond, the wheelhunters were withdrawing.
They had three large, squat vehicles that Ram had not seen before. Not the Wildcat tanks that he’d seen attacking the airfield, these were lower and wider, with six metal rimmed wheels aside.
The thought came unbidden, the knowledge simply there in his mind.
UNOP Designation: Wheelbug.
Two of them raced away toward the hills, black boxes bouncing away as if in terror. The remaining wheeler infantry peeled away after them, some in wheel configuration, others limping along like half-squashed spiders. The trailing Wheelbug vehicle slowed to a full stop and a side ramp shot out. Wheelhunter soldiers careened up into it.
The enemy was being fired upon by Captain Cassidy’s Marines, advancing from the airfield flank. Their rounds shredded the slowest of the wheelers until the stragglers were all dead. In a cloud of stones and dust, the enemy transport vehicle sped off after the other two.
Outside the outpost, two or three dozen wheeler bodies lay mangled on the ground.
From the side, Captain Cassidy and his men advanced with a spring in their steps. The Marines next to Ram slapped him on the back, over and over, laughing and congratulating each other.
“Come on,” Sergeant Stirling said. “Let’s grab some spare ammo from those lazy bastards.”
Ram helped two of them over the jagged wall and they walked on shaking legs out to meet the others.
“Oh, bloody hell.” The English Marine by his side, Hagman, had a deeply lined, hard face and carried on her shoulder a rifle that was longer than she was tall. She was looking behind them at the outpost. “Bastards took out the antenna,” she said.
At the northwest corner, once there had been the towering spire with guy wires holding it upright in tension, now there was a jumble of twisted metal and cables at the corner of the outpost. The walls bent in. White smoke billowed out sideways and plumed up into a curling mass where the wind pouring off the hills pushed it away to the west.
“That’s the only way to speak to the Victory,” Ensign Tseng said.
“The outpost is on fire,” Corporal Fury said, pointing. “That’s where all the smoke was coming from.”
“Fire suppression system will put it out,” Cooper said.
“Or the civilians will,” Harris said.
“Is that where the civilian bunker section is?” Ram asked, even though he knew the answer.
“Look,” Private Flores said. Her name and rank flickered over her head on his barely-functioning AugHud. She pointed.
From the northern flank of the outpost, came the huge form of Sifa.
Something was wrong.
Her EVA suit slick and shining with blood. She was waving her arms, pointing at the gaps in the hills where the retreating wheelers had slipped through. When she came to within a few meters, the comms system overpowered the fading alien interference fields and it flickered back into life and her agitated voice came through. She had died, Ram thought, he had seen her die and yet there she was.
“They took them,” she was saying. “The wheelers took our people.”
A sick feeling gripped Ram by the guts.
“Who?” he said, striding to her. “Who did they take?”
Sifa’s eyes glared white inside her helmet. “I don’t know, six civilians. A biologist and a technician from Dr. Fo’s team. A physicist. That Russian engineer, she was the bulldozer driver who did the air—”
“What about Milena? Is she okay?”
Sifa frowned. “Milena? Is she the—”
“The driver, the Brazilian driver. Is she safe? You know, smoking hot, with the black hair and the—”
She was surprised. “Yes, yes. I’m sorry, yes she was one of them. One of the ones. She was taken.” Sifa pointed at the black hills.
The outpost burned. The Marines around him jumped into action, some checking the wheeler bodies and others racing to deal with the fire and evacuate the civilians.
Ram stared at the churned path where the wheelhunters had retreated. He would need the weapon that Sergeant Wu had shown him on the shuttle and he would need supplies, food, water. If it was possible, he would take one of the ETATs.
Hold on, Milena. I’m coming for you. Just hold on.
CHAPTER SIX
“Enter,” Captain Tamura said, without looking up.
Kat stood in the open doorway of his spartan office. After escaping from Arcadia and burning hard for the Victory, she had docked the shuttle and been working without rest ever since. She had helped the medical team collect the pieces of Mehdi’s body, despite their protestations. Thinking back on it, it was likely she had forced them into it and they had allowed her the unprofessional behavior out of pity for her loss. She had worked with the crew to carry out a full inspection of the shuttle to assess the damage, written and submitted her report and gone back to assist with the repairs.
She had not slept for at least two days. More precisely than that she could not say, as her exhaustion meant she could no longer perform basic mental arithmetic and her memory was impaired, and the drugs were playing havoc with her ERANS. Her adrenaline attempted to compensate for the exhaustion while her ERANS management drugs reduced adrenaline uptake and the stimulants she was cramming constantly upset the entire balance.
The effect was a stretching out of every moment into a dreamlike, underwater reality. She wondered if she had reached a higher level of consciousness and was now able to perceive the constant expansion of spacetime all around her. Immediately, she recoiled from the psychotic thought in horror. She heard Sheila’s voice in her head, in her imagination. I strongly recommend you engage temporary shutdown mode. That Sheila, Kat thought. Such a comedian.
“Enter, I said,” Captain Tamura repeated, staring at her. “What are you doing, Kat?”
Kat realized she was grinning at nothing, staring through the bulkhead behind the commander.
“Sorry, Sir,” she said, wiping her mouth and stepping inside.
“Take a seat,” he said, scowling, “before you fall down.”
He watched her closely as she leaned back, fighting the urge to close her eyes.
Deep, soft brown eyes with heavy black eyebrows above. Deep lines around his mouth, stretching up to the squashed-flat enormity of his nose. A lot of the women in the crew had the hots for their captain but Kat was never into that whole submission to authority thing. Give her a quivering young cadet shooting his load into his standard issue jockeys any day. Still, there was something mesmerizing about those soft brown eyes. The commander, his forearms resting on his desk, fingers loosely intertwined, appeared to be waiting for her to say something.
“Sorry, sir, did you ask me a question?”
He pressed his lips together and the wrinkles around his eyes wrinkled even more. “The XO ordered you to your quarters six hours ago.”
“Was it that long? I just had a couple of things to do first. On the shuttle, sir.”
The commander cleared his throat. A familiar, soft sound, like the warning growl of an ageing silverback. “The enemy ship will be entering orbit around Arcadia inside of twenty-four hours.”
“Assuming that they don’t just fly right by us, sir.” She blurted the words. Speaking her thoughts instead of holding her tongue. Classic Kat. Get a grip.
He fixed her with a look. “Yes, assuming that their deceleration burn and course continues as predicted, they will enter orbit soon. We will continue to also prepare for them to perform an attack run. Either way, all of us will need to be at our best in order to properly respond to this existential threat, do you not agree?”
The commander’s face blurred. She was seeing double so she closed one eye. “Er, yes, sir.”
“Your decision to use the Lepus like a damned gunship cost Mehdi his life and it risked bringing down the shuttle, which would not only have killed you, Mehdi and the wounded
evacuees, it would have severely limited the strategic and tactical options for this entire mission. We are not capable of constructing a new shuttle in the 55-Cancri System, are we, Lieutenant?”
“No, sir.”
“I don’t want to reprimand you. I’ve read your report, reviewed the data, watched the highlight reel. You saw that the Marines were unable to penetrate the enemy’s armor and you had the only large caliber weapon that could be quickly mounted and brought to bear in your hold. You innovated. That’s the kind of thinking we need around here, it’s one of the reasons you were selected for the mission in the first place. But your risk-taking behavior continues to be a problem. Rather, your attitude to risk appears to be progressing along an unhealthy path.”
No shit.
“Yes, sir.”
“Listen,” he said, voice softening. “I know what it’s like to lose one of your people because of a decision that you made. We haven’t been able to raise the outpost but I just got an update from Intel. The last images we had from a satellite pass showed the wheelers gone and our people making repairs to the structure. We know from the shuttle cameras that Mehdi scored multiple direct hits on the two Wildcat tanks that were flanking the outpost on the airfield side and the latest images confirm it.”
The screen he pushed across the desk for her to look at might have been anything, because she saw two of them, one swimming about on top of the other, obscuring any detail.
“Yes, sir. I see. Thank you, sir.”
He pointed at her. “You will go to your quarters and you will go to sleep. You will not return to active duty until Dr. Sharma has signed you off.”
“Sir, that seems—”
The softness in him vanished. Snuffed out like a candle. “Are you seriously about to argue with me, Lieutenant?”
She hesitated. “No, sir.”
He nodded. “Dismissed.”
***
