by David Ryker
She shot almost from the hip, a five or seven shot burst that shredded the guard’s torso with metallic slugs. He didn’t have time to yell.
Tomlins kept running down the hill for a few strides; you could see the effort it took for her to slow her momentum.
“Nice rides,” she said, coming to a halt a little ways uphill from the fallen guard.
“Don’t go near the bodies,” I said, standing up and checking my rifle’s charge. “I can still hear people approaching.”
“How many shots do you have left?” Tomlins said.
“About twenty,” I said. “That was, what, six of the guards?”
“Those weren’t guards,” Tomlins said. “Those were Coalition uniforms. They probably came in on one of the quads.”
“Then what were they doing out here?” I asked.
As I spoke, Anderson came running up to me. “What the fuck was that?” she said. “Who was…”
“Do you remember if it was guards or Coalition chasing you?” I said.
“It was definitely guards,” Anderson said. “Molin’s a prick. She’s got a beef with me, and she’s thrilled to have an excuse to kill me.” She was walking down the hillside; I could tell when she recognized the bodies, because she stopped dead in her tracks.
“Um,” she said, looking up at me. “It definitely wasn’t those guys.”
In the silence that followed, I noticed a silence in the background that hadn’t been there before. The sounds of the pursuing guards were gone.
I swallowed. “Those weren’t the ones chasing you?” she said.
“No, they weren’t.” Tomlins ran to one of the bodies and pulled up two plasma rifles. Her eyes were fixed on something in the jungle, just downhill. “They were running.”
I scanned the forest where she was fixating as she backed slowly up the hill with the two fully-charged weapons - or at least, I hoped they were close to full charge. I realized they’d probably expended a few shots when I saw what they’d been running from.
11
One of the “Things they don’t tell you about the Belters” is one of their best strategies for getting people to shut up and kill: they have some of the best medical care in the galaxy, and it’s free if you don’t mind selling a small portion of your soul.
I was never really sure if that circumstance was a cause of the Belters’ blood, or just a bonus effect. Either way, I knew that I was a lucky son of a bitch to get to work with professionals like Dr. Vasilyev.
It was Dr. Vasilyev who told me how the “uncanny valley” works. It was during a routine checkup, making sure my natural blood hadn’t rejected the biotech I’d only earned a few months before.
The human body, he explained, is not so different itself from a learning machine. We figured that one out back in the First Space Age, when we were first getting into psychoscience. Like any other learning machine, we get programmed with a bunch of known facts about the world.
For example, the way an animal moves. Our brains get programmed, over the years, with a bunch of visual rules for identifying an object as “definitely an animal” or “definitely not an animal.”
It’s why we still have dogs around, Dr. Vasilyev explained. Dogs light up all the boxes for “definitely an animal” in our brains, and we like it when something lights up all the right boxes. Just like an AI has a voice that definitely doesn’t sound like a normal person: we want our robots to light up all the boxes for “definitely not an animal,” thanks very much.
Because we don’t like it so much when something lights up, say, about a third of those boxes. Our brains are telling us that it could be an animal, based on the visual rules it’s following.
But there’s also a bunch of visual rules it’s not following. And our brains realize that they can’t tell, really, if it’s an animal or a machine or something else entirely. It’s in that “valley,” Dr. Vasilyev explained to me once, where we just don’t know what the fuck it is we’re looking at.
That’s not an uncertainty that has, historically, been good for our chances of survival. We don’t do well when we don’t have an answer to the question of “Exactly what the fuck is that?”
So it was a very, very small comfort that I recognized the things that were crawling through the jungle toward us. There were five of them. Truth be told, “crawling” was a pretty rough description of what they were doing. The movements were too fast, for starters.
“Holy shit,” Tomlins said as she scrambled up the slope to join our party. “It’s those things we ran into earlier.”
“Then this will be easy.” Salter already had his plasma rifle charged and raised to his shoulder. He fired a burst of five blasts that should have mowed down the red and black creatures that were stepping through the vegetation in front of us.
But instead of the meaty sound of the blasts tearing through the creatures, there was a noise like a shout that I could hear throughout my whole body. And a burst of light, and silence - and there I was, reeling backward, clutching my rifle to my body while I flew through the air. There was pain, and there was a moment of darkness, and then I was in the leaves. It took me a couple of seconds to get enough air back in my lungs to speak.
And then I said, “No it fucking won’t.”
I never could get used to the feeling of getting sensory input from my whole body. It’s not like being blind, not completely. But my eyes’ input was coming second to everything else.
“Hold still,” Salter said.
He was sensing the same thing I was, then: The wall of red and black had dispersed back into five flat-faced, skittering monsters. They moved by extending their legs and pulling themselves through the foliage. Couldn’t get a sense for what they were grasping with. If they were grasping. They had weapons.
“That wasn’t an animal back there,” Tomlins whispered to me. “Was it?”
“Back where?” Anderson said. She was huddled in with us, terror written clearly on her face. “What…”
“Ssh.” Salter was up and crouching, watching down the hill. He turned to me. He pointed to the...the things. His gesture swept up the gulch, toward where Leka and Curtis had taken the jumpsuits. His hand moved to me, and then to Tomlins.
He made the sign for “let’s go.”
I replied with another, less tactical, signal with one finger.
“What?” Tomlins said. “And leave me wandering here all alone with you?”
Salter looked at me in a way I didn’t like. It was the way he looked at Tomlins when he was trying to intimidate her. “Do you want to see my alternative?” he said. “I’m told you can be made to be quite useful.”
My stomach sank. He had to be bluffing. There was no way he’d been told the full extent of what my Belters’ blood meant. There was no way he could tap into my abilities like that. “What alternat…”
“Ssh!” Panic disrupted Salter’s smug face for a second; I turned back to the xeno creatures in the jungle.
Just because I was concerned enough for the wounded right now not to leave them didn’t mean I was willing to be a living weapon, let alone bait - but it looked like some combination of the two was what I was going to wind up being. With unnatural quickness, the stalking creatures in the gulch turned and arranged themselves into a circle. A wave of nausea washed over my whole body. I could see on Salter’s face that he was feeling it, too.
The things were nervous. Nervous about what? They didn’t know.
Wait - had I just been reading their thoughts? Salter and I were staring at each other, both of us trying not to show our fear on our faces. Whatever these things were, they were somehow interacting with our Belters’ blood, as though we were radios keyed into their frequency. A sense of chilling unease ran down my spine. Could they sense us? Could they tell we were there?
I shook my head at Salter. He had to be bluffing to start with, but even if he wasn’t, this was the worst time in the universe to do what he had in mind.
A sound came from one of the xenos - or kind of the equ
ivalent to a sound, if my chest cavity counted as an ear. And then it rang out from another.
Salter paused with his mouth open, eyes fixed on the xenos as they all proceeded to creep closer to each other in a circular formation. I felt the distinct, coppery tinge of fear in the air, and my brain told me (without explaining how it knew) that they had lost one of their number.
“Start firing!” Tomlins said, raising her gun. She sunk a solid slug or five into the head/body portion of one of the xenos, and its dished sensory appendage toppled to the ground.
“Thanks, you fucking moron,” I said as I raised my plasma rifle to my shoulder. Now, I had no choice. “Say it, Salter!” I said. “If you even know my fucking code phrase!”
There was a shriek as the remaining four xenos came moving toward us, extending limbs and contracting them in ways that did not make any fucking sense to my eyes. I hit charge on my secondary rifle and set it at my feet as I fired a long, scattered burst in front of us.
“Vercingetorix!” Salter said. His tongue didn’t trip, as some did, over the archaic word that activated the full abilities of my biotech. “Vercingetorix!”
I managed to wound one of the xenos before they got that damn shield up again and sent the both of us flying.
This time, I was ready when I landed, gun already in my grips. I didn’t have enough adrenaline in my system yet to really get the blood going, but I could feel it starting to take control of my body. My bending legs felt like two steel springs coiling. I was shooting by the time they uncoiled.
I’d never really been into drugs. People who were have told me that this is what it’s like, when it hits you, when everything slows down and you become your body. Nothing more. I ran through a wave of electro-mag force that had deflected my plasma bolt like a foam dart from a kid’s playgun.
“Collins! Fall back!” Salter’s voice behind me was like a string; the instinct to follow it was so strong I almost lost my balance.
The things were running from me - they were running toward each other. With their janky, mechanical limbs they were clasping on to each other as they released a humming sound so overwhelming that I felt like I could almost see it.
“Holy shit,” I said, stepping back and watching - or trying to watch - as red and black shapes fused and folded together into a kind of flat-topped pyramid. My eyes wouldn’t understand precisely how the xenos had formed themselves into a xeno hovercraft, but “xeno hovercraft” was the only label I could fix on what was in front of me.
“Run!” Anderson said. “It’s got guns!”
“Guns,” I groaned as I spun away from the new threat. “Of course it’s got guns.”
Because after all, why wouldn’t it? Clearly the universe had a fucking problem with letting me just work off my sentence and make it home to my kids. It wasn’t enough that I was stuck on this rock with a bunch of psychos, now I had to deal with freaking shapeshifting aliens, too. Of course I did.
“Collins, come on!” Salter yelled. “With me!”
We booked it up the hill into thick foliage. Tomlins fired a few bursts at the craft with her solid slug rifle, and it got off our asses and lifted into the atmosphere.
“What the fuck was that?” Tomlins said.
“I don’t know,” I said. I turned to Salter. “Turn it off,” I said. “And don’t you...don’t you…” God dammit.
Salter smiled. “Excellent,” he said. “If it wouldn’t have blown our cover, I would have done this long ago.”
“Done what?” Tomlins said. “What did...oh, shit!” Her jaw dropped. “You’ve got some kind of mind control on him, don’t you? Jesus...”
“That’s none of your business,” Salter said. “The important thing is that we get out of here before more of those fucking things come…”
“Coast is clear, guys!” Curtis was yelling from uphill.
Salter sighed. “And to do something about these idiots,” he said, gesturing to the group of green jumpsuits coming out of the trees. “We should have run from them when we had the chance.”
“These idiots” turned out to be seven convicts who in previous lives had been mercs, security guards, surface transport people, and Coalition soldiers. They didn’t have weapons, but they had enough skill that they’d be better than useless trekking through these woods.
Anderson was their leader. She was an involuntarily-retired smuggler, doing nineteen of thirty. Her eyes were sunken and bloodshot, and she was breathing heavier than she ought to be after her exertion. Everyone standing around me looked ill, actually. More than a few were sporting tumors on their faces and necks. It was little wonder they were less than keen on going back to the source of the poison smoke that was starting to fill the low valleys.
“There’s nothing back there for us,” Anderson said, pointing toward the textiles plant. “Some of my people have sworn they’ll never go past that treeline again, and they have my word I won’t make them.”
“I’m not making anyone do anything,” I said. I decided not to glance at Salter. So far, he was being remarkably well-behaved. He tended to do that when he was outnumbered.
“And it’s damn foolish to say there’s nothing for you there, anyway,” Tomlins said. “These creepy xeno fucks made a nice smoke plume for a reason, and someone needs to do some recon so we can find out what that reason is.”
“I have an idea,” Anderson said. “The reason is that they’re going to fucking kill us!”
“That’s warfare, my friend!” Tomlins gave her one of those special smiles, where her upper and lower incisors were balanced on top of each other. “And if we don’t…”
“She’s right,” I said before this could escalate. “Without an idea of their numbers, their weapons, their tech…”
“We’re wandering through this jungle blind.” The gray-haired man nodded with a certain finality that seemed to quiet Anderson.
Now that one made me curious. His name was Simms. He was on three years of eighty. He didn’t say much, but he was always watching. Not just looking - watching. There is a difference.
“Blind is better than dead,” Anderson said.
“Blind is usually the precursor to dead,” Simms said. “Look. I didn’t want to stick around Textiles any longer than I had to, but...but obviously, our circumstances are a little different now.” He licked his lips as his eyes ran across our weapons. “We should at least see who wants to volunteer for a recon trip.”
“I’ll go,” said Okafor, a tall and lanky young man who wore an eyepatch to conceal something lumpy and weeping. “We need to know what we’re up against, so we know how much time we have to treat the wounded.”
“Well, that’s a point,” Anderson said. “But we need a force to stay with the wounded.”
“And you can lead it,” I said. “Does that satisfy you?”
Anderson grunted. “I guess,” she said. “But if any of my guys get killed because of your dumb-ass intel gathering plan, I’m gonna be a long way from satisfied.”
“Nobody’s getting killed,” Simms said. “I’ll make sure of it.” He looked at me - or was it through me? - and nodded. “I was a lieutenant in my World Defense,” he said.
“Is that a request for a weapon?” Tomlins said.
“I’m no good with the Coalition plasma tech,” Simms said. “But I can handle a solid-slug rifle just fine.” He didn’t smile with his mouth as he nodded, but there was a weird delight in his eyes that made me wonder exactly what he’d been sentenced for.
Tomlins looked down at the weapon she was clutching, then looked at Simms and clutched it a little tighter. “I’ll give you the first extra solid I find,” she said, sounding less than sincere about it. “They seem to be, uh, more effective against these little shits than the plasma weapons.”
“You don’t have to tell us that,” Anderson said. “We saw what they did to the first wave of Coalition grunts who came at them with plasma rifles.”
“Oh, did you?” Tomlins said, a mean grin cutting across her
face. “You maybe wanna share any of this really fuckin’ helpful information with us, or do you have some more bitching to do first?”
“It was like the plasma bursts made them stronger,” Okafor said, the horror of what he’d seen spelled out in his eyes like a holo-marquee. “My vision is not...wonderful.” He let out a tired chuckle as he pointed at the diseased crater that spread beyond his eyepatch. “But I was close enough to the first landing that I could see the Coalition troops try to attack them.”
“The first landing?” I replied. “Then you saw their ship…”
Okafor shook his head. “Whatever craft they’re using, it’s cloaked really well. Better than anything I ever heard of when I was a flight mechanic. The Coalition guys are supposed to have some weaponry that can de-cloak a ship, and it didn’t even touch it.”
“Do you think they’re even using ships?” Anderson said, looking at me. “We saw them link their bodies together and just...fly off.” She mimed a hovering motion with one hand.
“We’re not gonna find out unless we get going,” I said. “Come on. Tomlins, Simms, Okafor - and whoever else is crazy enough to come along with me.”
“I’m coming,” Salter said.
“Oh, right,” I said. “Can’t forget my favorite guy in the whole jungle.”
12
They say that back in the day, on Old Terra, every people in every nation had their own mythology for how the world was built. Giants, monsters, and gods all competed for credit when it came to universal creation. The stories could get intense, from what I’d been told.
Bathys 2’s creation story was stored on a nanochip nested in a server world somewhere. There was only one version. After the Coalition had acquired it, they blasted holes in the jungle with orbital rad-free explosives. In the resulting craters and cracks, they had found and built places to dispose of and/or repurpose the garbage of the galaxy.
The textiles plant was a classic example. The landscape was kind of like a giant funnel, with a wide track-churned road at the western end where supplies and materials were brought in and out by the ton. The head of the road was barricaded with survees now, and the Coalition troops darting between them were the only signs of life I could see.
