“I see something,” she said. “But I can’t tell what it is.”
Akantha grunted. "Kalta doesn't know something. I'm shocked."
Baravit rounded on her furiously. "That’s enough noise from you, Akantha. You know any better?"
The trooper looked abashed. "No, sir."
"Then go and find out," Baravit said, gesturing. “You two, cover her."
Kalta, Javed, and Baravit dropped into the ready posture, positioning themselves with arcs of fire that covered the mysterious object, making sure that their line of sight would not be blocked by Akantha's advance. Kalta watched as, with more than a hint of caution, Akantha made her way through the ruins.
It took seconds for the trooper to cover the distance, but as tense as she was, to Kalta it seemed like a lifetime. Akantha stopped when she was a yan short of the object, aiming her carbine; then, with visible relief, she straightened.
"No danger, sir," she said, turning back to face the squad. "Ghar battlesuit, but it's long dead. Destroyed in the invasion by the looks of it. All clear."
The moment Akantha stopped speaking, Kalta felt a splitting pain in her skull, like the worst migraine she'd ever had. She cursed under her breath and flinched. It seemed her body still had not recovered from the bad reaction she'd had in null-space; it was like the nausea right before the scanner malfunction, or the nosebleed when Heyne had gone missing.
A cold feeling ran down her spine.
"Akantha, get out of there!" she practically screamed. The other woman shook her head as though disgusted.
"I told you, this thing's no threat."
"Move!"
But Akantha did not move – she gave no sign of having heard Kalta at all. With a clattering, clanking sound the long-dead Ghar battlesuit rose ungainly to its feet, glanced dismissively down at Akantha, and with a casual swipe of its claw, swatted her against the nearest wall, where she collapsed in a heap.
Kalta didn't hesitate. She pulled the trigger a moment before the others, the three of them pouring shot after shot of pure plasma into the clumsy, terrifying thing. Chunks of metal were blasted off it, but this did not have the expected effect - it seemed only to attract the battlesuit's attention, and it came for them, loping awkwardly over the ground with its bizarre three-legged gait, waving its arms madly. If only Heyne were here, Kalta thought - his plasma lance would have hit harder than the squad’s carbines could.
And yet, she realized, their shooting was damaging the suit. Great lumps of it were falling off and the main carapace was already cracked open. Exposed, the Ghar pilot within was nothing more than a lifeless pile of bones - then a plasma shot from Javed, to Kalta's right, landed a perfect hit, vaporizing its skull.
Still the suit kept coming.
"Run!" shouted Baravit, grabbing her by the elbow. She needed no second invitation - in a moment she was on her feet, and she, the strike leader, and Javed all fled.
Sprinting through the ruins in the dark, all Kalta could think of was the apparently invincible battlesuit chasing them. Gone were all concerns about finding her footing - just a terrified certainty that their enemy could not be stopped. As she ran, she heard Baravit sending a transmission to the main force, desperately calling for reinforcements.
They had covered perhaps forty yan when Baravit gave the order to stop running and take cover in a crater. "Support is incoming," he told them, urgency in his voice. "Slow the damn thing down!"
The three of them took up firing positions again and trained their weapons at the advancing battlesuit. Kalta had expected it to gain on them during the chase, but it had lost ground - now twelve yan behind them, and was it moving even more awkwardly now?
Baravit and Javed did not wait to find out. Once again, their weapons spat blinding sparks of plasma at the oncoming enemy. Again, each hit damaged the suit - and it was definitely slowing now, each step a laborious struggle to raise and place its leg, its wildly flailing arms moving as though in slow motion.
"Stop firing," said Kalta quietly; it took the others a moment to work out why. The battlesuit stumbled a few more paces, but it seemed no more threatening than a training drone. Finally it reared up, as though realizing the fight had gone out of it, one last act of defiance before its inevitable fall -
- and from behind them, the whine of anti-grav suspensors announced the arrival of a heavy support drone. Its plasma cannon shrieked once, almost deafening Kalta, targeting the Ghar suit. Brilliant white light engulfed the dying machine, obliterating it; shards of red-hot metal pattered to the ground like rain.
"That," said Baravit slowly, as the heavy drone pushed on, searching for more battlesuits, "did not act like any Ghar I've ever seen."
"I don't think it was a Ghar," began Kalta. The others looked askance at her. "I mean, of course it was, once. But the pilot inside was long dead. I think something else..."
She wasn't sure how to finish the thought, or to put it into words. But maybe she didn't need to; Baravit and Javed nodded, slowly.
"Come on. Akantha may still be alive," said the strike leader. Kalta and Javed followed him as he ran back the way they had come.
* * * *
The strike captain looked incredulous. "What in Antares are you talking about?"
"The battlesuit last night, sir," explained Baravit again. "It wasn't alive -"
Captain Lemelle closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, exasperated. "The M4 drone destroyed the battlesuit, Strike Leader, and the battlesuit killed your trooper. Or are you telling me something else did that?"
"No, it was the suit that killed her, sir," said Baravit, struggling to make himself understood, "but its pilot died years ago. Something else was controlling it - the same thing that took Trooper Heyne, and the same thing that made the scanners malfunction."
Kalta spoke up in support of her strike leader. "It's true, sir. It's something to do with what happened to me in the trans-dimensional tunnel. My body keeps reacting in a similar way, and every time it does, something strange happens. Sir."
"Something strange," said Lemelle, slowly. "So is it you that’s making these strange things happen, Trooper? Or are you telling me that null-space wants to kill us?" The disbelief was evident in his voice and his face.
She flushed, but it was Baravit who replied. "I know you've fought Ghar before, sir, so I know you've seen what their weapons can do. They don't just fire plasma, or projectiles - they damage real-space itself. They ran rampant on this planet for a year or more, sir, slaughtering everyone they could find. Can you imagine what quantum gravity weapons, firing constantly for a year, might do to the fabric of reality?"
The strike captain stared at him, openly contemptuous. "I have found that imagination has very little practical application in the C3, or on the battlefield. Perhaps if you exercised yours a little less, the IMTel might have deemed you fit for promotion beyond strike leader at some point in your long career." He glanced at Kalta, then back at Baravit. "I'd expect this idiocy from her, but not from you."
Kalta opened her mouth to protest, but before she could get a word out, a trooper from another squad hurried over and addressed Lemelle, saluting smartly. "Sir, the sensor probes report incoming hostiles, closing on our position."
The strike captain whirled around, eyes lighting up. "Do we have confirmation this time? No more malfunctions?"
"They'll be in visual range in moments, sir."
Kalta caught a questioning glance from Baravit, and she shook her head. She felt perfectly normal - no hint of the unwell feelings that had accompanied the earlier attacks.
"Get your squad in position, Strike Leader," ordered Lemelle, smiling. "We're finally getting the fight we came for."
He turned away, barking further orders; Baravit turned too, in the other direction, and Kalta followed. Together they joined Javed, who had been waiting for them.
"How did it go?"
"Not well," Baravit replied, "but never mind that now. Enemy incoming, let's get going."
&nb
sp; The three of them broke into a jog, joining the flow of Concord troopers moving in the direction that the probes had made contact. A half-fallen wall provided ideal cover - Baravit dropped into a firing position, and Kalta and Javed threw themselves to either side of him.
Kalta aimed her carbine ahead. Twelve yan away, behind a killing ground of craters and rubble, ruined buildings blocked any further line of fire; but now, there were signs that something was out there. Distant shouts and the noises of scattering rubble told of a large number of troops approaching; occasional gunshots, the crack of crude projectile weaponry, suggested that the probe drones were coming under fire. At last, she would see battle - true battle, not firing ineffectively at a suit that could not die because its pilot was already long dead. Though of course, it could easily have been as fatal for her as it had been for Akantha.
She was surprised to find that her heart rate was even and regular. Shouldn't she be pumped up by adrenaline, by now? Somehow, she was not. She supposed her training had prepared her for this moment. The IMTel had selected her for it, making the decision that she had neither the capacity nor, at the time, the inclination to make. Now that the moment was here, she found herself impatient for it to begin.
Seconds later, she saw her first living Ghar. Small, ugly, misshapen, it stumbled into her field of vision, waving its gun aimlessly above its head. Before Kalta could target it, plasma shots from other squads cut it down. It was not alone - three more followed it, then another five appeared to the right, another group to the left, and more.
The din of firing plasma weapons fire rose to a deafening crescendo. Taking her lead from Baravit, Kalta pulled the trigger of her carbine, picking her targets with care. Her first shot missed; the second found its target an instant after it took a hit from another trooper. Her third shot found its mark, though, and Kalta allowed herself a moment to celebrate her first kill. Her fourth shot was another hit, her fifth shot missed; but still the Ghar kept coming, and by now some of them had found the wit to return fire - not that it seemed to have much effect; the sharp retort of their hideously primitive weapons seemed more noisy than threatening.
"Where are the suits?" asked Javed, as much to himself as the rest of the squad. Kalta heard Baravit answer him, still shooting.
"The Ghar often send in their Outcasts as the first wave. A chance to probe our position and provide living cover for the battlesuits."
"Yes," said Javed, "but what are they providing cover for? And they can't provide cover for anything if they're dead!"
Kalta had to agree. A hundred Ghar must have swarmed into the killing zone by now, and at least sixty must already have been slain, cut down by concentrated firepower from the whole company of C3. They were advancing without purpose, it seemed to her; but there was no sign of any three-legged battlesuits, not even any of the Scutters or disruptor cannons that she had been taught about in training. Another Ghar Outcast seemed to walk directly into her firing line, and she pulled the trigger again - how many had she killed now? Four? Five? Her tally was probably far from the highest.
All at once the enemy had had enough. The few surviving Ghar turned tail and fled, hooting at each other and throwing their guns away. The Concord troopers kept firing until they were out of sight - there was no place for mercy when fighting such a foe. To Kalta's left, a heavy support drone swooped in, chasing the fleeing Outcasts. Its plasma cannon seemed wasteful against such pathetic targets. It outpaced them easily and was soon out of sight.
It had all been so easy. She nearly laughed to herself, thinking of all her years of training. Then her first proper battle had seen the enemy practically queuing up to die. It was quite the anticlimax.
"Come on," said Baravit, standing up. Kalta and Javed followed his lead, and together they walked into what had been a killing field. Ghar bodies - tiny, fragile - lay everywhere; occasionally one of them would twitch, not quite dead, and be dispatched by a Concord trooper. Kalta kept her gun up, just in case. She leaned in to examine the first corpse she came to. It was thin, emaciated; naked but for a loincloth, ribs poked through its skin. A single plasma shot had taken a fist-sized chunk out of the Ghar's neck; it must have died instantly. Its repulsive yellow eyes seemed to stare at her, challenging her. She got no sense of empathy from that look. She imagined it hating her, purely for what she was. In truth, she felt much the same way in return.
She heard the strike captain’s voice behind her. "That's how you deal with Ghar," he said, triumphantly, addressing Baravit; Kalta saluted, though she felt little enough respect for the man. "Disciplined, focused fire. No panic, no silly stories of dead soldiers coming back to life. Not a single casualty," he added, almost gloating. "We killed over a hundred Ghar here, without taking a single casualty. Your two are the only troopers we've lost on this mission. Some might call that careless."
Baravit chose his words carefully, very obviously struggling to resist speaking out of turn. "These slaves were never any threat, sir. They're cannon fodder - starving cannon fodder, at that. I'm not even sure they all had guns. The other Ghar must have left them behind. Too unimportant to bother transporting off-world."
Lemelle glanced dismissively at the dead Ghar next to Kalta. "Yes, I think you're right. If this is the extent of the Ghar presence on Astioch, it's ripe for resettlement. I will send word to the IMTel. We'll have wiped them out by the time the next fleet arrives."
The strike captain walked off pompously, as though striding through piles of dead bodies was his purpose in life. Kalta watched him go. "Sir," she said to Baravit, "I know these Outcasts were easy targets, but..."
"...you don't think re-settling Astioch is such a good idea?" the strike leader finished for her. She nodded. "Trooper, I think you may be right."
* * * *
The air was hazy with smoke, and the stench of scorched flesh filled the air. Captain Lemelle had ordered the dead Ghar piled up and burned. Kalta's squad were among those assigned to the grisly task; clearly they were still out of favor. Elsewhere, other squads hunted down the Outcasts that had fled the ill-fated attack. Occasional distant plasma blasts spoke of another unfortunate Ghar being found and dealt with.
Javed joined Kalta to watch the pyre blaze. "Congratulations," he said. "Successful first mission."
She sensed the unspoken caveat and couldn't help but share it. "It doesn't feel like a success," she said. "We lost Heyne and Akantha."
He shrugged. "Yeah, but their consciousnesses are probably being rebooted into a new body. That’s life in the C3.” He glanced toward Lemelle, who was busily giving orders for the clean-up operation. "Whatever’s happening on this planet, though...? I think it’s a bigger problem than the strike captain realizes."
"Yes," agreed Kalta. It worried her that her superior officer ignored her concerns so readily, though at least Javed felt the same way. It made her feel a little less like she was crazy.
Then, it happened, right on cue - a spasm of dizziness, another case of what she had come to think of as her body giving her a warning of null-space phenomena. It was brief: she barely even swayed, only just enough for Javed to notice and frown, but it was enough for her to be certain. Something was about to happen - something that could not happen in any normal part of real-space. Something other. Something dangerous.
"Sir!" she shouted, running already. She knew the strike captain wouldn't believe her, but she had to warn him - she had to try. Lemelle looked at her, disdain written across his face, as she closed the gap, still shouting.
"What is it, Trooper?" he asked, sounding bored.
"You have to order everyone onto alert," she said, speaking quickly. "Something is about to happen - like the scanner malfunction or the reanimated battlesuit - I don't know what, but something!"
The strike captain stared at her in disbelief. Not, she sensed, that he simply didn't believe what she was saying - that would be understandable, she had to admit - but he almost couldn't believe that she was speaking to him in that way.
"
I have had enough of this," he spat. "Where is your strike leader? I'm sending you and him both back into orbit for corrective programming. You've clearly been taken in by some ridiculous superstition and I will not have it in my company. We are in absolutely no danger here whatsoever."
Even as he said the words, he was wrong.
The funeral pyre flared brightly, unnaturally, burning orange yet casting a sickly green light. The flames billowed higher, and higher, well above the ruins, higher even than the buildings would have stood before the destructive weaponry of the Ghar brought them low. The Concord troopers backed away, shouting in alarm, shielding their eyes from the blaze. The strike captain himself looked incredulous, but Kalta - prepared for this event, or something equally unlikely - tried to get through to him.
"Sir, order the retreat!"
Lemelle just stared at her, confused. The heat from the fire was intense, but even that did not seem to get through to him. "What?"
Kalta gave up. "Get away! Get back!" she screamed, turning away from the strike captain, shouting at her comrades. They didn't need much encouragement; in a moment or two, those closest to the fire were running, diving for cover, for protection from the heat.
Even as Kalta watched, backing away to give herself distance from the pyre, the flames collapsed. In the space of a moment, the burning fire shrank from dozens of yan high to nothing - or almost nothing. There, glowing white hot, were the unmistakable outlines of Ghar Outcasts, formed of pure flame.
Small, spry things, as their corporeal counterparts had been in life, these unreal warriors of fire bounded over the rocks toward the retreating Concord troopers. The nearest soldiers of the C3 acted exactly as they had been trained - they leveled their carbines and opened fire. Spears of plasma blasted into the unnatural things running toward them, but far from killing them like had happened to the real Ghar Outcasts, these creatures of energy ignored the shots completely. For a mad moment, it almost seemed to Kalta that they grew larger, absorbing the energy of the plasma fire.
Beyond Antares Dimensional Gates Page 16