A shrill scream. Inhuman, whatever it was. Then another explosion. Gunfire, fiercer this time. He heard Helsingor’s voice, shouting commands, but the man didn’t respond when Svensen demanded answers.
He did get through to Eirik Haugen from Wasteland, though. The man’s raiders were also under attack. Gray-skinned aliens. Not Adjudicators. Short, stubby things. But Haugen was in the thick of it already and in no mood to talk.
“The hell with this,” Svensen said, and stopped trying to reach other commanders. He’d get in there and find out for himself soon enough.
He joined his men in using their suits to cut through and peel back the cladding that clung stubbornly around the bombproof. Finally, they got it out of the way.
Raiders poured out of Boghammer and into a long, sloping corridor. The curve of the enemy ship’s hull and the markings on the walls told him he was, indeed, inside an Adjudicator ship. Even the pattern of blinking, pulsing displays and the quality of light were the same as what he’d seen when he battered his way onto Star Fortress Delta.
He braced himself for automatic gun turrets or green-armored Adjudicators charging down the hallway, or . . . what? Helsingor claimed his enemy didn’t include mech units. Maybe they were nothing more than alien civilians armed with makeshift weapons.
“Put the gun there,” he ordered a pair carrying a heavy machine gun and mount. “We’re going to move up the corridor, but I want these points held. You,” he told a raider with a metallic silver helmet, “place your charge below that black panel.”
“Svensen!” Jörvak shouted. He crouched, together with three other men, along the rightward sloping corridor. An antenna-like sensor array blinked across his helmet like the two glowing eyes of the jack-o’-lantern painted there. “Someone’s coming around the bend.”
Svensen was still pulling men out of Boghammer, and there was some problem with the seal that caused the freighter to leak atmosphere into the void where the two ships joined. He was trying to seize the enemy ship, not destroy it, and so he had two men spray foam, sealing the gaps.
He ordered a number of men to advance ahead of Jörvak and the others. They soon had raiders forming rows, three deep across the bend. The first rank knelt, the second crouched, and the third stood over their shoulder. Everything from Gatling guns to pulse weapons faced whatever was approaching.
A strange gray creature came around the bend. Not an Adjudicator, that was for sure.
The alien was only about five feet tall with thick, stubby legs and long, dangling arms that dragged the ground. It had big, mournful eyes, almost Hroom-like, except for a membrane that flickered across the eyeball in a side-to-side motion when it blinked.
Woolly gray hair grew in sprouts across its head, but only on one side. The other side of its scalp was bare, except for a piece of metal and gears and shimmering circuits that jutted from its skull.
The creature wore a formless jumper the same gray as its skin, with a bulge at its belly that looked as unnatural as the thing sticking out of its head. It shambled forward, half waddling, half dragging itself. The alien was so pathetic in appearance, so harmless looking, and so different from what they were expecting, that Svensen lost a critical moment while he tried to figure out what he was seeing.
Slave labor, maybe? He could save it, he could—
“Cavlee!” the thing shrilled, and leaped forward.
It had been moving so slowly that the men were caught off guard. But those short little legs had concealed a powerful jump, augmented by a push from its arms. It flew through the air and came down as if to land on the front rank of Scandians.
Raiders fired while it was still in the air, and the thing twitched and shuddered, dying with a scream even as its body fell on top of Svensen’s men. One of them made a sound of disgust as it draped over his shoulder, and he shoved it away with his forearm.
The creature exploded with a muffled woof. A green, snot-like substance splattered outward, together with blood and brains and body parts. Raiders cursed and made gagging sounds, which quickly turned to shouts of alarm and then screams as the green substance ate, hissing and sizzling, into their armor. A man staggered past, tearing at his arm piece to strip it off as the acidic spray burned through to his flesh.
“Look out!” someone shouted.
Another creature came bounding from the other direction and hurled itself at the men taking up formation on the opposite side. They shot it before it could make that final leap, and it hit the ground and exploded, harmlessly out of range.
Within seconds, they were being charged from both sides by scores of the creatures, all shouting “Cavlee!” as they launched themselves at the Scandian formations. One broke through and slammed into a pair of raiders trying to set up a machine gun, and left them burned and screaming.
The only good thing was that the acid bladders the creatures carried under their clothing burned hard and fast and reacted with the air, rendering them inert within seconds of impact. The atmosphere soon registered dangerous levels of several volatile chemicals. The mech suits filtered that out. It had a harder time filtering the stench of melted plastics, burning servo lubricants, and alien blood and brains.
So many aliens were coming that he could barely advance. He got through to other companies of raiders, one no more than thirty feet away, to discover that the rest were similarly pinned down. Marines poured into the far side of the ship, but had already lost several of their number to the explosive suicide attacks. Soon, they too couldn’t advance.
Svensen thought of the human defenders on Delta. They’d come racing across the floor, eyes gleaming with zealous faith. These creatures, he was convinced, were slaves, not committing suicide of their own free will, but driven forward by their masters.
Jörvak made a head shot that brought down one of the creatures at a good distance and turned his pumpkin head toward Svensen, lights flashing. He pumped his fist in triumph. Svensen snarled to pay attention, and at that moment, four more creatures came leaping forward.
“Cavlee!”
The raiders shot them dead, but they exploded atop several men who were already down and burning. They screamed as fresh acidic jelly splashed over them.
Svensen stared at the victim of Jörvak’s head shot. It sat slumped against the wall, still alive. The shot had torn off the top of its head, right where the metal and circuits emerged from its skull. The creature touched the wound gingerly, and then it balled its hand into a fist and drove it against the wound. It screamed in pain, but brought the fist down again. While the raiders watched incredulously, the alien battered at the open wound on its head until it fell face forward, convulsing.
Jörvak shook his head. “Crazy, suicidal vermin. We’ll have to kill them all.”
Svensen had other thoughts. He called Vargus on the com, and fell back toward the breach as another wave of aliens threw themselves at his lines.
“The aliens carry exploding acid bladders. We’re pinned down, can’t move.”
Her voice was grim. “So is everyone. You might have to slaughter your way through the whole crew.”
“They’re slaves. Brain implants. Driven forward, no free will. I can see the Adjudicator tech sticking out of their skulls.”
“Good to know.” A bit of sarcasm to her tone. “What are you going to do, dig them out with a knife? Bit hard to do when the dumb things are leaping onto everyone and exploding.”
“Do you have a beetle ship at hand?”
“Two of them, in fact. What . . . oh! Right. You’ll lose com, you know.”
“Given the choice between losing com and having my face melt off in an acid attack, the choice is pretty easy.”
“Done, Svensen.”
He tried to call the other commanders to warn them, but had barely got them online when the line went dead. Curse it all, that was fast. The beetle ships must have blasted their jammers at the freighter the instant Catarina Vargus called them. Whatever else you said about the Singaporeans, they were effic
ient.
At the same instant com went down, a trio of cavlee-screamers came hop-running forward and flung themselves through the air. Scandian guns turned them to pulp before they could reach their target, but while the raiders were still riddling them with bullets, a second, larger wave raced up from behind.
A high, chilling wail. “Cavleeee!”
Svensen’s blood went cold. He saw at once that they wouldn’t bring the aliens down in time. The first three or four would hurl themselves into his front ranks. Then, when the front raiders went down writhing under the acid, the second wave would leap over the top and slam into the raiders clustered behind. Twenty or thirty men would go down at once, with even more of the self-exploding little buggers racing down the passageway. After that, wave after wave of the Cavlee creatures, until . . .
The Cavlee collapsed to the ground. His raiders, recovering their balance, turned guns on them and began to shoot them up where they were lying. He was shaken from how near they’d come to annihilation, kamikaze-style, and it took him several seconds to recover.
Lund and Jörvak came up to him. “What happened?” Lund demanded, helmet pressed next to his. “And where in the icy hells is our com?”
“Jammed their mind control.” Svensen used his boot toe to flip the head of one of the dead creatures and expose the implant emerging from its skull. “They won’t be coming back online, and neither will we.”
They moved forward with hand signals, much more efficiently than during their assault on Delta, when it had been the ghouls who’d done the jamming. He kept their movement cautious, not knowing if the enemy had countermeasures and they’d soon find themselves under renewed attack. That meant leaving sentries with guns to guard for a potential retreat.
The corridors spiraled downward with no lifts or ladders between levels. They had hooked almost all the way around the perimeter of the ship when they came across fifty of Vargus’s marines, recognizable in their sleek gray mech suits with twin Albion lions painted in gold across the breast.
The marines stood over several dozen of the strange gray aliens, all of them dead, their implants torn out. It was a bloody, gruesome mess.
Svensen found the marine commander, a woman who introduced herself as Lieutenant Tew. She had a gruff Mercian accent, and her helmet cocked curiously when Svensen responded with the same accent.
“You a marine inside that bug gear?” she asked.
He growled. “Scandian.”
“Huh. You must have one of them Chinese implants, am I right?”
Svensen wasn’t about to get into it with this woman. “You didn’t need to tear out their implants. We’ve got them jammed. Didn’t Vargus tell you before she pulled the plug?”
“We didn’t do any tearing. The damn critters yanked ’em out on their own.”
Svensen thought of the creature with its implant blown apart that had bludgeoned its open brain cavity until it went into convulsions. He looked down at all the bodies with sympathy now, wondering what it must have been like to get their willpower back. All they’d wanted was to die.
Tew gestured with her assault rifle. “My colonel is up ahead trying to break through to the command center. Someone shot us up pretty good when we tried to go through the front door. Thought at first it was one of you Vikings, but it wasn’t friendly fire. There’s some ghouls on board.”
That got his attention. There might be more to this fight than putting down Adjudicator slaves. He pushed ahead with several raiders, while he had others blow holes in the walls to look for an end around, if that proved necessary.
Everywhere they went they came across more Cavlee. And once, they met some marines outside a room filled with what he could only describe as giant insects, with multifaceted eyes and mandibles and chitinous legs—the whole lot. Strangely, the creatures seemed to have died some time earlier, each one with a pierced shell and its body fluids drained before someone had stacked them in heaps.
More Adjudicator slaves or something else?
He didn’t have time to contemplate this mystery as gunfire sounded ahead, a fierce rattle of marine rifles, together with a thumping pulse that he couldn’t immediately identify. The raiders ran forward on power assist.
Dead aliens. A downed marine, helmet off, being seen to by a medic. Blast holes in the walls and floor. The gunfire fell silent ahead, just as he ran into a mixed company of raiders from Boneless and Loki. These men joined Boghammer’s raiders and they continued as a single group.
When Svensen finally reached the command room, he stopped in irritation. A marine colonel sat atop a smoking control console. Dead Cavlee were strewn about the room, their implants torn out of their skulls, and a single, armored Adjudicator lay in a heap below the colonel, who propped his mech boots atop its head like a footrest.
The colonel’s helmet was off, and his teeth pinched a cigar, which he’d already clipped, and now proceeded to light as he grinned at the newcomers.
“You boys were too slow.”
“What?” Svensen said. “It’s over? Are you sure?”
“All of it, son.” The man took a deep puff. He kicked at his footrest. “Can you believe it? So much trouble over one blasted ghoul.”
Chapter Eleven
Nils Oolmena began to despair that he’d ever put his plan into motion. Fifteen days had passed since he’d met with Lum Gee, and the planet’s wildlife refused to cooperate.
He’d built an observation post atop the small mountain of rock and dirt excavated from atop the Dweller, sheltered it from the blistering heat and pouring rains with sheets of metal and plastic, and studied the plains whenever he heard the trumpeter beasts bellowing. Each was the size of a house, and carried a small flock of leathery birds that fed on the insects and other creatures stirred up by its passage.
Most of the time, the trumpeters were tranquil, almost placid, but he’d seen them react when a predator threatened their young. The entire herd stampeded in a thundering, trumpeting roar. All it would take was one of the things to come inside the compound and his plan would come into play.
But to do that, he needed one to approach the perimeter fence, where the grass grew tall and undisturbed. That didn’t happen. In fact, when one of the males approached the fence, a huge beast with a broken horn, Nils Oolmena saw, among all the marks in its bristly hide, an old scar that looked perfectly straight, running from its front shoulder to its tail. A burn scar.
These animals had learned not to approach the tall grass. It burned.
It was dawn one morning, and Nils Oolmena turned from watching a herd of trumpeters to study the excavation as the work began for the day, hundreds of figures taking the ramps into the cut. Two hundred feet deep, six hundred feet across, and they’d exposed the top of something black and rubbery. The thing shifted beneath the excavators when they crawled over its back, like a giant stirring in its dreams as insects tickled its skin.
How long until it woke and fixed them with its gaze? Any moment, perhaps. Or maybe they had weeks to go before the Adjudicators arrived to call it to the surface. He wasn’t sure how the final stages would play out.
The Dweller is holy and pure, the Slave Master had told him, but it cannot be allowed to contaminate this planet.
Nils Oolmena didn’t quite understand that. If it was pure, how could it contaminate anything? And it must have been down here already when the Adjudicators found it. They’d have never set it down on the planet—such a thing would violate their strange faith.
He was thinking about this, watching the Dweller for more signs of its awakening, and so he didn’t notice the disturbance on the plains until the noise drew his attention. When he turned toward the sound, wondering what predator had the trumpeters so agitated, he saw that they were tearing up the ground and throwing up a huge cloud of dust.
He left his shelter and winced against the sun, already hot even though it was only minutes above the horizon. Two Cavlee sat outside, folded up on their haunches with their backs against the wall o
f the overseer’s shack where they could crouch in the shade of the overhanging roof. They’d slide around the building during the day to stay out of the heat. He kept them on hand to run messages; the implants allowed for direct brain-to-brain communication, but only the Adjudicators could use them at a distance.
He spoke through their implants. “I need Lum Gee. Fetch her from the excavation.”
“Lum Gee? Lum Gee? Cavlee?”
That’s what he heard, a very strange sort of language with a hundred minute variations in tone and inflection. What came through his implant was very different.
“Which one is Lum Gee? A female of your kind? What is the length of her legs and feet so that we might recognize her?”
His old runners had died, and these ones were new. He impatiently explained about Lum Gee’s pink skin, product of sugar eating, and how he thought she’d most likely be with the dozer crew on the third cut.
They ran down the hill in that loping, hopping way of theirs, and he returned to his shack and grabbed for the binoculars. The dust was so thick now that he had a hard time picking out the individual trumpeters, and the strange quality of light at sunrise didn’t help matters any.
They seemed to be digging, tearing at the sod with their horns. He’d always assumed those horns were for fighting or driving off enemies, but now it occurred to him that they were strangely flat and shovel-like. For digging. But why?
Lum Gee approached at a trot. Her nose slits flared and closed as she took in each breath. Dirt streaked her face. He held out the binoculars and gestured out the window slit.
“What do you make of that?”
She didn’t follow his gaze or take the binoculars, but only stared at him expectantly. He hummed in annoyance and reached into the pouch at his belt. She snatched up the sugar pack, tilted her head back, and poured it in. A long, whistling sigh emerged and her eyes took on a far-away, glazed look.
“What?” she said, looking about.
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