by Guy Haley
And then, there were no more.
Alien dead and dying lay all over the courtyard, their yellow blood mingling freely with the red of humanity. A couple skittered away, headed for the gate. Gunfire sounded from the East Mesa still, but less of it with every passing second. Corrigan tried his radio, but could not summon a voice to tell him whether the sounds of battle were fading due to victory there, or defeat.
He wiped his hand across his mouth. He remained tense, anticipating a fresh rush and final extinction.
None came.
“What now?” Corrigan asked Dariusz.
“What do you suggest?” said Dariusz. “You are the military man.”
Corrigan looked up at the comms mast. Even with the fence disabled, they’d known where to come. He stared out through the mesa edge fence over the firezone Anderson had cleared from the river. The smashed bodies of natives dotted it. “There’s no going back, not after this.” He said. “We have to finish what Anderson started. Follow them back to their lair, and kill them all.” He spat on the ground. “Then perhaps we can go back to living like civilised people.”
Kasia and Sand were still up in their ULs. They told Kasia to fly out, and to report back on the natives, to see where they went to ground. Then they reordered their men. Fifty still combat capable, a mix of soldiers and militia. They followed the wounded creatures in the three ATVs that had escaped the rampage, keeping their distance, the rest of the small army marching behind. The road back was clearly marked by the dead, slumped insectoid bodies as big as buffalo.
The natives’ home was a low hill, notable only for its solitary nature. Kasia picked out the concealed entrance that led into it, close by where Sand had lost the trail. The weave of brush and sand that had hidden it was cast to one side.
The battered army of First Landing moved in for the kill.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Genocide
SOLDIERS WAITED TENSELY above the burrow mouth. Facing the entrance, the rest of the army were ready, hiding in the scrub and boulders either side of the natives’ path, guns trained on the concealed opening. The shattered bodies of natives littered the torn ground, turning the dry earth into a gory swamp.
“Incoming!”
A native burst from the burrow entrance. Machine gun fire barked from three positions. Grenades rained down on it, dismembering it messily. Body parts bounced to join the shattered remains of its fellows.
“Clear!”
Corrigan lay prone by Dariusz. He craned his neck and shouted back to the ATVs. “The radar still running?”
“Maximum output, sir!” replied a soldier.
“No sign of any other movement, sir!”
“That could be the last of them. If it wasn’t, it doesn’t look like they have another rush in them,” Corrigan said. He was exhausted, his eyes red-rimmed. “We’ll wait. Ten minutes. Keep the EM up. See if we can lure any more of those bastards out. Ayvazian, casualty report!”
“Six wounded, three dead. Twenty-three natives killed.”
“Are these new, are the wounded natives still in the hill?” asked Dariusz.
“Impossible to tell.” Corrigan coughed. “We’ll find out soon though, won’t we?”
Ten minutes passed. No more natives emerged from the tunnel. Corrigan signalled two of his men to run forward under cover of the machine guns. They placed explosives around the burrow entrance, then ran back.
“Giving fire!” one shouted.
A second later, the doorway to the native village exploded with a dull crump. Soil rained down on the group of men.
“That’s it,” said Corrigan. “Come on.”
The door had been a woven mat of stiff, resinous material. Dariusz scooped a fragment of it off the ground. It was surprisingly light, and Dariusz was put in mind of the lairs of trapdoor spiders on Earth. The burrow was wide enough for three men to walk down abreast. There was no shortage of volunteers to take point; the men were all angry, eager to kill the monsters that had attacked their families. Three were chosen and moved in, weapons ready, dropping flares as they went. Dariusz and Corrigan waited until they’d moved out twenty metres, then followed into the dark entrance, three more men behind them.
“Look at this,” said Corrigan. “Slick as glass.” He ran his hand along the burrow wall. Its contours glittered in the light of the flares.
“The friction of the creatures’ shells must have polished it,” said Dariusz.
“Still...”
“I know. It looks like something built by a mind, rather than instinct. We do not know for certain if they are... were intelligent. We are endowing them with human traits where none might exist. If we were shrunk down to ant size, and went into an ants’ nest, it would appear like a city to our eyes.”
Corrigan nodded. Neither of them were convinced.
The burrow went on without interruption for two hundred metres, bringing them, by Corrigan’s estimation, directly under the hill. There were no side passages or blockages to the burrow; it was a straight, glassy tube that terminated in another door that they could not open. Corrigan called up his remaining combat engineers again, and had the others cover the men as they wired the door. They were forced to exit the tunnel entirely before detonating the explosives. A rush of smoke and debris billowed from the tunnel mouth. They waited, but nothing else followed.
They entered the hill.
A deserted labyrinth of tunnels and cells greeted them.
The corridor rose up and opened in the centre of a space that even in the dark they could tell was vast. Corrigan had flares and torches lit, revealing how big; a huge, beehive-shaped cavity that went down into the earth further than it did up above the ground. A spiral ramp led from the tunnel mouth up the sides of the chamber, with many doors leading off. Elegant, fluid traceries covered the ramp’s sides, making exquisite galleries of it. A sense of tranquillity pervaded the place, but the organic beauty of the hive was marred by corpses, seven dead natives lying in pools of their own fluids on the chamber floor and on the ramps, their shells shattered by the weapons of the colonists.
Corrigan had five teams of three split and scour the place. It was dark within, the aliens having no eyes, and their torches often lit the indescribable. Strange sights greeted them at every turn, and Corrigan and Dariusz were called from one end of the empty hive to the other to examine fresh wonders.
In one cluster of cells, things like giant amoebae swam in lipped pools of thick syrup. In another, stacks and stacks of flat slates. Elsewhere, they found piles of sand, carefully graded by size. In three broad, domed chambers at the base of the hive were fields of unfamiliar vegetation.
“Farms? Livestock?” said Corrigan. He inspected close-packed stands of tall fungus, playing his torch beam over them.
Dariusz nodded. “Like ants again, but more sophisticated. Look!”
By a wall, in a neat row, were a series of what could only be implements. Dariusz picked them up one at time. They were curiously small in comparison to the natives’ size, and their shapes mystified him, but it was obvious they had been crafted for some purpose or other.
“Corrigan. Tools.”
“Still like ants?” said Corrigan.
Dariusz shook his head. “Not like ants.” He placed the implement carefully back with its fellows. “What we’ve done here...”
“We can blame Anderson.”
“Can we?” said Dariusz.
Corrigan’s response was interrupted by shouts over the radio. Gunfire, and frantic chatter followed, then the radio cut out. They could hear the pop of gunfire echoing around the hive. Corrigan swore and keyed the radio on.
“Team three, team four, converge on weapons fire. All other teams, take cover. Come on!” he shouted to Dariusz.
They ran back into the central space, then up the ramps, following the soft rattle of a carbine. The gun cut out, shouting taking its place, and they ran faster, reaching a wide room where blood was sprayed liberally. They came in ready to fight, b
ut there was no battle. They were greeted by the sight of one of the men being restrained by two others.
Corrigan put up his gun. “What the hell happened here?”
“More monsters, sir,” spat the restrained man.
“He wouldn’t stop firing,” said one of those holding him. “They showed no signs of aggression.”
Dariusz looked around the room. The dead things were the size of large dogs, a couple of dozen of them. They were huddled together in a corner. Dariusz locked eyes with their executioner. “Have you no mercy?” he said. “You have murdered their children.”
“Dariusz,” said Corrigan. He looked at him warningly, and then turned to his men. “Call us if you find anything else, do you understand? Nothing else dies without my order,” said Corrigan.
The men nodded.
“Now let him go.”
The men dispersed, and continued their exploration.
The humans encountered no more living natives. Here and there was the odd slumped body of a creature, grievously wounded in the battle of First Landing. They had come home to die.
In other chambers they found more tools. As far as Dariusz could tell, the majority of them were linked to food cultivation, processing and preparation. Jars and bowls, scoops, firepits and others. Water was another feature. In one room, a series of basins, another a deep cistern filled to the brim. The sheer variety of the artefacts convinced him they could not simply be the product of instinctual or even learned behaviours. This was the sign of culture. He felt sick.
The chamber at the top of the hive’s low rise was the final proof. There they found clear evidence of symbolic thought that could not be denied.
They entered through an oval door whose clay edges were decorated with intricate designs of inlaid haematite. At its centre lay a native whose shell was cracked and gnarled, not broken by the guns of men but by time, and Dariusz guessed it to be of great age.
It was dead.
A broad pool of yellow blood surrounded it. In one hand it held a hollow circular knife of polished stone, stained with its own life fluid.
It was the only time Dariusz ever saw a native with a weapon of any kind.
“It killed itself,” said Dariusz. “It killed itself when the others were killed.” His voice was hoarse. His throat was closing up with emotion. “We are the monsters here, not them.”
Corrigan shook his head. “It’s a matter of survival. We had no choice.”
“We do not deserve to survive, if this is the way in which we go about it,” said Dariusz, bitterly.
“We had no choice, Darius,” Corrigan repeated.
They stepped over the creature’s splayed limbs. The dome of the chamber was filled with intricate designs of inlay, a mosaic of tesserae cut from polished minerals of many colours. The designs ran in a continuous spiral that started at the chamber’s apex and wound its way down toward the floor. The lower third of the wall was blank. A pile of polished chips and a shallow bowl of adhesive lay at the very end of the design. Dariusz knelt and touched the last few chips. They moved in their cement. He carefully nudged them back into place and wiped his hand on his trousers.
“This is still wet,” he said. “This elder here, he put these last marks on the wall and then killed himself.”
“Is it a record of some kind?” said Corrigan.
Dariusz looked around. “Perhaps. Writing for creatures whose senses are different from our own. A record, a history maybe. And we brought it to an end.”
“Let’s get out of here,” said Corrigan.
They left the chamber. The whumph of ignited accelerants and the bang of explosives chased them down the hive’s spiral ramps. The smell of burning was drawn right the way through the natives’ home, pulled by air currents of deliberate design. Corrigan did nothing to halt the vandalism. Dariusz thought the destruction of the hive gratuitous, but could not formulate an argument in his mind to stop it. He was too tired to fight over it, too ashamed.
Neither of them spoke as they reached the bottom.
“Sir,” a soldier spoke over the radio. His voice was clear. The airwaves were free of the interference emitted by the creatures. “You have to come and look at this.”
They went down to the very bottom of the spiral road. In a chamber, bigger than any other and carved from the bedrock, they found many tons of equipment taken from the Mickiewicz. Whether from the nightside or the wreckage nearby, they could not tell. Arrayed neatly according to size, much of it was free of damage, save in one respect: every one possessing a radio beacon or active wireless interface had had those things smashed out of them. A good deal of time was spent cataloguing the material once the hive was clear.
By chance, they came across a working genetics microlab within the first five minutes of entering the cave. Dariusz was ashen faced as the others celebrated the retrieval of such valuable treasure. His time was up; with the microlab, the colony techs could pinpoint who had been the saboteur in seconds.
He was going to have to leave.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Dariusz Unmasked
SAND FOUND PIOTREK and went to help in the infirmary, and almost wished she had not. The place was packed with the wounded: missing limbs, missing skin, missing eyes. They screamed for comfort the overstretched medical staff could not provide, and the auxiliary nurses like Sand and Piotrek did not know how to administer. Sand, because she was the senior council member in the infirmary, and because she had some small medical knowledge, was set the grim task of deciding who would be treated, which was the same as deciding who would die. Battlefield triage – with her as the arbiter of life and death. She was supposed to be dispassionate, but how could she be? One by one the injured were treated, and drugged into sleep, transferred to the East Mesa hospital or died. Past midnight, the infirmary grew quiet. Sand fell into a troubled sleep.
At 06:25 the following day, she was awoken abruptly. The horizon lit up with flashes of yellow fire. The crackle of arms fire and rumble of high explosives carried across the plains back to First Landing, causing those left behind to look to the north. With the long-range radio transmitters damaged by the natives’ assault of the comms mast, rumours spread in the absence of fact. The troops were dead, the troops were alive, Dariusz had been killed, so had Corrigan, they both lived. Plock had been seen, screaming in terror. The radio spoke strange noises... None of them, as far as she could tell, were true.
At 07:40, Kasia arrived back at the colony in the remaining UL, smudged with soot and exhausted, but otherwise none the worse for wear. The girl sought out Sand, and they embraced amid the sleeping casualties of the earlier struggle. Kasia had no information for Sand, having been airborne for the entirety of the second battle, and both of them worried about Dariusz.
The infirmary did not remain quiet for long. At 08:03, the first ATV roared through the main gate bearing more wounded men, and Sand was pitched back into the stinking, roaring hell of the previous day. The wounded brought news, but far from quashing the rumours, they generated more. She asked again and again after Dariusz, but none of the men and women returning from the native’s village had seen him. Then she was occupied for a while.
At 10:55, Sand took her leave and went looking for Dariusz. First Landing was in uproar. Smoke still boiled from the wrecked Command Centre, the comms mast drooped dangerously over the courtyard. Troops and militia straggled back from the natives’ torched village in twos and threes: triumphant, or traumatised, or both. ATVs ran back and forth in endless loops between the shocked here and the bloodied there. At first they brought the wounded, then the dead, then the cache of equipment the aliens had taken from the wreckage of the Mickiewicz. The soldiers filled the warehouses with this unlooked-for bounty, and of all the horrors and marvels of that day, it was this that caught the eyes of the colonists as they ran frantically about their tasks, and made them pause awhile.
First Landing had to it the seeming of a disturbed ant’s nest. Activity churned under the surface, in its l
abs and factories, its halls and barracks. The town disgorged the entirety of the human race upon Nychthemeron. Frenetic work was being done to repair the defences to the village, techs ran wildly from place to place, engaged in metaphorical firefighting as others fought real fires. The hospital and infirmary were full of the dead and the dying. No one knew who was in charge. Yuri was at death’s door, Leonid and Anderson dead. There was shouting at East Mesa, the threat of further violence, as the militia, headed by the last four of the Mickiewicz’s security personnel, attempted to disarm those troops and militia deemed loyal to Anderson. The militia were little loved by the colonists. Now it was safe to speak out, many did so, and they fixed their hatred upon them. The militia tried to pass it on to the Pointers’ men, who, for their part, protested their loyalty to the colony authority, and spoke loudly of their role in the battle against the natives.
Sand heard later that it was Corrigan, wounded himself, who talked both sides down, and had the blacksuits sit it out. Everyone was suspicious of everyone else’s motives. Drunk on terror, people played games of spot the collaborator. After so many weeks under the boot of Anderson, the place was in danger of coming apart under the release of pressure. There were angry scenes near the food warehouses, and Sand was obliged to take time out to calm the situation and make sure the supplies were properly guarded.
By 18:00 things were quietening down for good. The council had convened for an emergency session, for which she received many urgent requests to attend. She ignored them, continuing her search for Dariusz. She asked around in all the usual places, and then again, and then a third and a fourth time, but he had not been seen. She helped out where she could, or where she had to, and hurried away to the next crisis. All the while she asked again and again where Dariusz was. She encountered a number of people who asked the same question of her.