by Dan Davis
“Alright, sir, that’s enough,” Stirling said. “For now. We have to move.”
“They sold you out, Tseng,” Ram continued. “So that means you really and truly are one of us now. You understand? They’re not going to give you whatever they promised you but it’s alright because you’re one of us. You have nowhere else to go. We’ll stick with you. We’ll follow your orders because you’re a good officer, and you know we’re doing the right thing. Right, guys?”
“That’s right,” Stirling said. The others chorused it.
Tseng straightened up, nodded. Ram retrieved Tseng’s sidearm and handed it over. And he felt kind of goofy doing it, but he gave the ensign a proper salute.
“Come on,” Tseng said, turning and grabbing a rifle from the back of his ETAT. “Stirling, carry on.”
Stirling, Cooper and Flores advanced over the scree and broken ground, advancing on the lava tube entrance. It was out of sight behind a gigantic outcrop that stuck out of the slanting cliff face like the prow of a titanic ship. The Marines were tiny in comparison, little figures darting forward, covering each other as they advanced.
When they reached the base of the outcrop, Stirling turned and waved. Tseng waved back and they moved out, leaving Fury to watch over their getaway cars and all their gear.
Ram crunched down the broken shards of stone, following Harris and Tseng, hugging his battle rifle. He felt ready.
The AugHuds went down before they were halfway there. Either the wheelers were waiting for them or they had a permanent field around themselves.
The opening of the lava tube was about six meters across and about four meters high. The bottom of the tube buried under piles of scree that the aliens had cleared away. The ground was slippery and uneven in the approach and there was no way the wheelers had used the route for their vehicles. They must have utilized other exits from the lava tube network for their attacks on the outpost. Ram was relieved he would be unlikely to have to fight a tank but it might mean they’d be in entirely the wrong part of the complex when looking for the prisoners, who were taken away in the Wheelbug APC type of vehicles.
Stirling’s team advanced to the edge of the tube, feet sliding in the loose ground. The sergeant crouched against the wall, held his rifle ready and peered inside, darting his head in and back out. He paused then looked inside down the sights on his rifle, standing and bracing himself on the side.
He turned and gestured for Tseng to proceed.
Ram crunched after the ensign and Harris, passing Stirling and the others with a nod, his rifle ready as he rotated inside the lava tube.
It was dark within. He didn’t know what he expected. His eyes were superb in low light conditions but not in no-light conditions. The armor clicked and his visor flicked a new layer down over the old one, bringing the inside of the tube into grainy focus. The squat tunnel stretched away into what first of all looked like an infinite blackness but when they’d pushed inside a few steps, he saw it was a sharp turn in the tunnel a little way inside.
He hurried forward, finger on the trigger, to the inside bend and hugged the wall as he advanced. Harris and Tseng hurried behind him. The ground leveled out and the footing got firmer. Up ahead, reflecting from the walls and ceiling, there was light. Not bright white light but a dim glow like moonlight in midsummer or the oppressive dull grey skies before a monsoon downpour. His armor picked up sounds, clanking metal and repetitive tapping. Static fizzed in his comms system from a range of bands and he silenced the whole thing.
Harris hustled around him, taking position in front so that he had a clear line of sight and Ram could fire over him. Tseng stayed in the back.
The tunnel curved further and then straightened up.
Wheelhunters.
The tunnel kept going straight but now, between the walls, alien equipment. Boxes, tables, rods, wheels. Light from ceiling lamps bathing everything in infrared.
In amongst it all, wheelers worked. At least six of them, rather small compared to the ones he had seen before. All wearing the black, flexible suits. Working busily at the sides of the tunnel, a couple in the spider configuration but most in the upright wheel form, their long arms tapping and filing away at tools or weapons or something on the benches at the edges.
The sight of them took his breath away. Alien creatures, so seemingly different and vile, like a giant spider crab cross bred with a lizard. Animals with no heads, no eyes. Creatures so wrong they made you want to vomit and run away. Yet there they were, working quietly away, individually. At work benches, just as a human might. Just as humans had done for thousands of years, all over the Earth.
Harris took aim at the nearest one.
Ram slowly placed a hand on Harris shoulder, who lowered his weapon a fraction by way of acknowledgment.
They might never get a better chance to kill so many wheelers at once. They had the drop on them.
But something felt wrong.
Where had the eight patrol members gone? Had they come through this way? Were they in a side chamber, waiting to roll out, guns blazing? Murdering the six before them seemed easy enough but what would the consequences be of coming in shooting?
They looked so harmless. As harmless as a seven-feet tall alien monster could look. Surely, they were engineers, not soldiers.
Ram stepped forward, in front of Harris. He pointed his rifle in the air and held his other arm out to one side.
“Hello,” Ram said, his comms set to external projection.
The wheelers flinched and stopped. All six of them froze what they were doing. The nearest one was the first to move, creeping back to the others.
Ram could sense Harris and Tseng behind him, squirming and furious but they held their fire. For now.
One of the ones behind raised a three-fingered hand and pointed the three claws at Ram.
“I know we’re enemies,” Ram said. “But we’re just here for our friends. We just want to take our friends and go. You know, friends? Like us? The ones you took when—”
A terrible sound pierced his head. His words turned into a cry of pain as his joints and nerves seemed to be on fire all over his body. The scene before him dissolved into darkness.
Then it was gone. Just the echo of pain remained, humming in his limbs. His sight returned.
He found himself slumped, down on one knee and leaning on his weapon. Harris and Tseng were sprawled on the floor.
Snapping up his gun, he saw the wheelers were gone.
Tseng and Harris took longer to get to their feet and Ram covered them while they did so.
“They’re gone,” Ram said, using external audio. “We need to hurry.”
“What weapon is that?” Tseng said. “Radiation?”
“We irradiated?” Harris said, panic rising in his voice.
“No. Electromagnetic stun weapon,” Ram said, checking the rad counter on his wrist. It had registered a spike but just on the danger line. “Has to be. Come on.”
They ventured inward. Harris went first, then Tseng with Ram at the rear again.
“What were you thinking?” Tseng said. Ram began to answer but Tseng cut him off. “I don’t care what you were thinking. Wait for orders next time.”
I will if you give any.
“Alright,” Ram said. “Ensign.”
Alien equipment lined the tunnel. Every few meters, sections of tunnel were partitioned by thin screens made from something. The aliens used metals that were silvered like stainless steel or mirrored as if they were chromium infused or polished to an incredible shine. Other equipment was dark, blacks or non-reflective surfaces. There was no color to anything, even under a ceiling light or their armor lamps.
“Why are they letting us inside so far?” Harris said.
“Quiet,” Tseng hissed, their voices echoing off the walls.
A door.
Ram saw it after the others had walked past. A doorway, cut into the rock on the side of the tunnel and fitted with a door so flush that the outline was barely
discernible. But it was there, highlighted in his infrared vision. Rectangular, a meter wide by two or three high. The partitioned section they were walking through was the longest one yet and the equipment lining the walls included hooks sticking from the rock and curving struts coming out of the floor with wide, shallow bowls on top. On the other side, another door.
By now, his team mates had reversed course to where Ram investigated.
“Doors,” Ram said. “Do you see them? Check further up for more. Actually, we may have passed some already, why don’t you go ahead, Ensign and Harris you head back and see if there are more.”
There were.
“Entrances to the other sections,” Harris said, pointing his rifle at the one Ram stood at. “That’s where the soldier ones are hiding.”
“Prison cells,” Ram said. “They’re prison cells.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Tseng said, sneering. “Wishful thinking. Probably storage areas. Closets.”
“Only one way to find out,” Ram said and without waiting for orders, he slipped the fingers of one hand into the gaps around the tall door, looking for a catch.
“Hurry up, if you’re going to do it,” Tseng said, covering with Harris.
Ram pushed his visor against the door, looking for a way to open it.
How would a wheeler operate a door?
A wheelhunter clawed hand jerked out of the door. Ram lurched away and staggered back in surprise. The door had a small hatch near the center and a wheeler arm was thrust through it, waving around looking for someone to grab, for someone to eviscerate.
“Don’t shoot,” Ram shouted, as Harris and Tseng took aim. “It’s stuck in there.”
The others hesitated.
“If it could get out, it would have opened the door,” Ram said.
Harris nodded in agreement and turned to cover the tunnel. The wheeler arm reached along the door as if it was trying to open it from the outside.
Ram walked up to it.
“Stop,” Tseng hissed. “What in the world are you doing?”
Ram ignored him and stopped just beyond what he guessed was the arm’s reach. He’d spent hundreds of hours fighting wheelers in Avar and he could tell by the arm size that this wheeler was another one of the little ones. He wasn’t afraid of it. He had faced a three-meter-plus monster one without a gun, without armor and he’d won. It had killed him but he’d won.
“No one fire,” Ram said. “It’s trying to get out.”
“Okay, fine,” Tseng said. “Leave it, let’s move on.”
“Wait a sec,” Ram said. “Why is it locked in?”
“Maybe it’s an idiot and the door shut behind him,” Harris said.
“Cover me,” Ram said. “I’m going to go in there.”
“You will not.”
“Believe me, I can handle it,” Ram said.
“You can’t even get in.”
Ram stopped. “Yeah.”
The wheeler arm seemed to be reaching for something at the side of the door, on the wall. Reaching, maybe.
Pointing?
There was something there. On the wall, a stick of some kind of rod. He grabbed it and lifted it off the wall. He stuck the narrower end into the gap and twisted. The wheeler pulled its arm back inside.
“Get ready,” Ram said.
He slung his rifle over his back and drew his sword.
“Why are you doing this?” Tseng said.
“Don’t shoot it,” Ram said. “I’m stronger than these little ones, alright? The noise might bring them to us.”
“Where are they?” Harris said. “The bastards.”
Ram pulled the door open, sword held in front of him. The room inside was small, the sides hacked from the rock in rough chunks. At the back, just a couple of paces away, the wheeler crouched low, three legs a side with the arms held out to Ram, the clawed fingers spread wide. It seemed to be pressing itself into the floor.
“It’s alright,” Ram said, holding the point of his sword down but ready to flick it up at any moment. “Don’t be afraid.” He could almost feel Tseng rolling his eyes behind him but Ram knew the wheelers were capable of fear, even if they couldn’t possibly understand his words. He’d felt it, somehow, in the shaking and desperate struggle for its life that the Orb Station Zero wheelhunter had fought in the Arena. “Don’t be afraid, I just want to help you. Did they lock you up? Did you do something wrong? I’m looking for human prisoners.” Ram pointed at himself and then out in the corridor. “Human prisoners, like me.” He pointed at himself and then at the walls of the room around him. “People like me, in here.”
The wheeler moved.
Ram whipped his sword point up to the wheeler’s hub.
It froze. Ram waited to see what it would do.
Keeping its hands spread and flat to the ground, the wheeler slowly crept forward, lifting one foot at a time. Ram backed up, letting it come forward.
“You’re not letting it out,” Tseng said. “I’ll kill it before I let it out here with me.”
“Tseng, I’m telling you I can kill this one with my bare hands before it will hurt us, leave it alone. Just wait. Just wait, alright.”
Ram backed all the way out into the corridor and the wheeler followed, creeping forward like a six-legged spider, the arms coming out of the hub on the top and the bottom as if they were held out to Ram. Held out and spread low as if to demonstrate it was unarmed and not dangerous.
“It’s a trick,” Tseng said as they backed out of the way.
“Harris,” Ram said. “Keep covering the approach but get over here. I don’t want this thing getting between us.”
“Sir.” Harris backed over to their side of the tunnel while the wheeler crept out into the center. It kept going, further up the tunnel and deeper into the wheelhunter complex.
“It’s getting away,” Tseng said. “I won’t let it escape.”
“The others must have raised the alarm by now,” Ram said, watching the wheeler back away slowly up the tunnel. “I don’t think we’re in danger of counter attack.”
“Might be on their way, sir,” Harris said. “These lava tubes run for hundreds of klicks.”
“What about the ones we chased in here?” Ram said, keeping pace with the alien.
“But did they actually come in this entrance, though?” Harris said.
“What is all this stuff?” Tseng said.
They walked past benches heaving with equipment, some of it bubbling and fizzing inside metal cylinders. Ram used his sword to poke the lid off one, while watching the wheeler to see how it would react. It didn’t seem to do anything.
“Leave their science experiments alone,” Tseng said. “Are you insane?”
“I’m in hermetically sealed armor, I’m not going to get infected.”
“I’ll remember you said that when you grow a second head.”
“I’m already on my second head,” Ram said, peering inside the container. It was too dark to see well but it seemed like some sort of red foamy broth, thick enough to have large bubbles forming slowly on the surface. He moved on, after the wheeler, who scuttled over to the next section and reached for something up on the workbench at the side of the tunnel.
“Stop!” Ram ran to it and held the sword to its hub. The thing stopped and slowly lowered its arm. “Move over there.” He gestured with the point. “Over there, you idiot.” It didn’t move.
“What was it going for?” Tseng asked from behind his weapon.
Ram glanced at the bench. His legs felt weak as he reached out for it.
“One of our civilian EVA suits.”
Harris growled. “Jesus.”
Ram pinched a bit of it and lifted it up. There was something heavy inside that slowly oozed out. “It’s filled with blood. Old blood, maybe some skin and other tissue. Maybe a couple of liters of the stuff, a day old? I don’t know. I’m going to take a sample.” He popped a medical container on his webbing, emptied bandages and drugs, then spooned in a few finger
s of blood and some stringy stuff that might have been shreds of skin or twisted, sodden hair.
Was this you, Milena? Oh fuck, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
“Well,” Tseng said. “At least we know what happened to them.”
Ram turned on him. “We don’t fucking know anything.”
“Let’s kill this thing,” Harris said.
“What are you talking about?” Ram said. “It showed us this. It understood why we’re here and it helped us. It showed us this, don’t you see?” Ram sheathed his sword and crouched in front of the wheeler. It flinched. “Where are the others?”
It didn’t move.
“There’s a door here,” Harris said. “Two doors.”
“Watch him,” Ram said and he searched for the rod keys and pried the doors open. Both were small cells, like the one that had held the wheeler. Inside the first he found Jane Munroe, the biologist. She was in her EVA suit but her helmet was gone. She was dead.
He was relieved it wasn’t Milena inside.
“Someone’s coming,” Harris said, just as Ram opened the second door, his hands shaking.
As soon as he saw the figure inside, he knew it wasn’t Milena. It was a man. Inside his EVA suit.
“He’s alive,” Ram said. “It’s the physicist. Zachery Arthur. He’s out of it but his heart and respiration—”
Harris screamed a warning. “We’ve got incoming.”
“Alright,” Ram said from inside the cell while picking up Arthur. “Hold your fire until—”
Tseng and Harris started shooting. Their rifles firing rapid bursts that filled the tunnel with a wall of booming, echoing noise before his armor or his ear implants compensated. Ram threw the physicist over his shoulder and peeped out. The muzzle flashes half-blinded him, showing the Marines shooting straight along the lava tube.
The wheeler crept away toward the exit, slinking low beneath the weapon’s fire. Ram let it go.
“Withdraw,” Ram shouted. He doubted the Marines could hear him. “Come on.”
An explosion smashed the wall apart near his head. Another blew a shower of rock chips from the ceiling down onto his armored head. The rounds shredded the equipment all around them and ricochets clanged off his suit. Ram ran, carrying the civilian for five meters or so then put him on the ground behind a sturdy-looking metal tub the height of a normal human. Ram crouched behind it, looking out.