by Dan Decker
I shook my head. “Not for a long time. Certainly nothing like this.”
“Really.” She frowned as she played with several strands of short hair on the side of her head. “I thought they only recruited ex-soldiers.”
“You serve?”
“I was a Marine.”
I snorted. “I was a lawyer. I was surprised when I awoke here. I thought maybe I’d gone to hell, but somehow this seems a little worse.”
She chuckled. “You’re the first non-soldier recruit I’ve met.”
Now that was an interesting piece of information. John Jeffs had served as well, in the army, if I remembered correctly.
“Do you know John Jeffords?”
“No, but I’ve heard about him. I guess he’s pretty hard on his group. I take it he is your drill sergeant?”
I nodded. “You could say that he’s hard but I don’t think that quite catches the full flavor.” I hesitated, thinking of mentioning that he was a serial killer back on earth, but decided to skip over it. It was not my place and if I was serious about acclimating to this new world so I could figure out what happened to my wife and son, I needed to be careful of every single word I said, even to some random soldier in the middle of a battle like this.
“What are you doing here?” Sampson asked. “I heard over the coms that all new recruits were supposed to evacuate.”
“I have not quite made it back to my team.”
She accepted my explanation without further question. I did not want to explain that I had been sent to do a lap, because that would have come with additional questions and the last thing I wanted to do right now was to start saying bad things about Jeffords.
“Should we head out?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Better than staying here, I guess. My instincts tell me to run, but I don’t think we can go far seeing as how we’re surrounded by miles of desert. Let’s see if we can find the regenerator so we can fix my leg.”
I gave her a look, uncertain if she was joking or not.
“Or you can just carry me.” Her face was still and then she smiled faintly.
7
To: General Gregory Seed
From: Brigadier General Forrest Brown
Log date: 00429.211-09:53:16
Re: Evacuation of Planet B24-X52745
General Seed,
I have ordered the evacuation but do not expect that we will save more than 70% of our recruits for the simple reason we don’t have enough shuttles on-site to evacuate everybody. Some of the training encampments are equipped with shuttles, but most are not. Many of the remote camps are going to be left in a lurch.
I am looking at the situation with my team. We will continue to search for alternatives to save as many as possible.
General Brown
8
Sampson did better than I thought she would, even taking the lead for much of the way after she had warmed up. The cast she wore seemed almost as good as a new leg as it somehow managed to support her while keeping pain at a minimum. I was happy to see that she could hold her own and was glad that I didn’t need to carry her. When we stopped for a break, I examined her cast and shook my head, marveling at how good of a job it was doing. In some ways it seemed as if her injured leg worked a little better than her other.
“That cast is holding up,” I said.
“I have to be careful not to overextend my other leg.” She gave me a thin smile. “That doesn’t make the pain any more bearable. It still hurts. Why couldn’t they have waited until this evening to attack? I would’ve had a brand-new leg by then.”
The battle raged on.
We traveled between two rows of tents. This was similar to the route I had followed with Roth when we had escaped that grenling my first day. We moved along the side of the tents, opting to duck underneath the supporting cords, rather than move freely in the open.
Several lurkers flew by overhead, but they did not take an interest in us.
I did not seen the one that had been chasing me.
I just hope it’s dead.
The moment we saw something moving we hid in the shadows until it passed.
The relative peace was unsettling, and had me jumping at nothing. At one point I spun around because of an uptick in the wind, afraid a lurker was landing behind us.
“A bit jumpy, aren’t you?”
Sampson did not look back, making my face turn red, but I tried not to let it get to me. I still had much to learn about this place, and she had received training, even before coming here to this mad world.
Perhaps this was why a few moments later, when a lurker hovered overhead, I did not notice for several precious seconds. I was trying to prove to Sampson I was not jumpy and it almost backfired.
It was the smell that made me look up, the foul rotting stench was unmistakable and could only be one thing. The lurker was twenty feet off the ground and ten feet back, slowly moving forward but not looking at us. I froze, Sampson did the same.
I inched over until my body was pressed up against the canvas tent. Sampson positioned so that her rifle was pointed up. When the creature was directly over us, I slowly reached out and touched her shoulder because I feared she was about to shoot. She had not seen the way that bullets bounced off their skin. I did not want a ricocheting projectile to hit one of us.
She gave me a questioning look. I shook my head while mouthing the word ‘ricochet.’ She did not seem to understand at first, but after repeating it for the third time she gave a short nod. She angled her rifle so that if there were any ricochets, they would not hit us.
I held my breath expecting her to fire, but she did not.
We waited.
The lurker’s wings were almost transparent. When in motion the wings were positioned like those of a dragonfly, buzzing just as quickly. The sand around us moved as if we had a helicopter flying just overhead, the movement of the wings created a low thrumming hum that grated at me in the same way it might bother a person to hear fingernails pulled across a chalkboard. Beads of sweat dripped down my face and into my eyes. I blinked, hoping the stinging would soon go away.
Each of the lurker’s six legs looked like it was made of multiple joints, enabling the legs to move every which way. One of the creature’s legs appeared to be broken and went off at what I assumed was an awkward angle.
The underbelly of the beast was pale white. Based on my experience with the grenlings, I had assumed that the lurkers were wearing an external armor, but now that I got a closer look, I realized that did not appear to be the case. There was a seamless transition from the underbelly of the beast to the armored scales it had on the rest of its body.
If the creature had not been right on top of us, I might have encouraged Sampson to take a couple of shots just to see if the underbelly was as resistant to bullets as the rest of its skin. I looked again for the weapon that was the source of the blasts that had nearly killed me earlier, but did not see anything that looked like a rifle.
The lurker did not move and hovered right above us.
Is it just toying with us in preparation to attack?
The creature’s eyes still stared off in a different direction, so perhaps it was lying in wait to make an ambush and was just oblivious to our presence.
Those blasts had to come from somewhere.
The lurker’s mouth?
Maybe it was a natural defense.
It seemed a stretch to think that the lurkers would have natural lasers, but I was starting to wonder if that was not the case when I finally studied a mass of moving tentacles just under the lurker’s head. I had assumed at first this was a decoration of some sort but I could now discern arms with fingerlike tentacles.
The arms had hands, with three fingers each. What I first mistook as six-inch long claws, appeared to have two inches of finger and four inches of claw. The fingers looked like they could bend every which way as well. There were about a hundred of the fingers all told.
Several blasts flew out from th
e lurker’s mass of arms, confirming my suspicion that this was where the weapons were located.
The wriggling mess moved out of the way when the weapons fired but returned right back to where they were before. The arms did not appear to have the same natural armor as the rest of the creature, but then why would they need it?
They were small and well enough guarded by the large looming head that they were not usually exposed to the gunfire coming from the defending soldiers.
If I’d had a rifle, I might have tried to shoot the lurker’s hands just to see what happened, so perhaps it was a good thing that I was unarmed. I probably lacked the restraint Sampson showed by training the rifle on the beast, but not firing.
The lurker fired again and this time I clearly saw a small blaster that it held in one of its weird hands.
I started to count the passing time just to give me something to do to keep from losing my mind. Two minutes passed and then it was four, all the while the creature fired but did not receive much return fire. Several rounds bounced off its thick hide, but they might have just been strays.
The fact this lurker fired without resistance made me nervous, fearing that we were losing the battle. Just as I was starting to think of suggesting to Sampson that we might want to duck into the tent and come out the other side, the lurker zoomed away, moving so silently that it would bring death from above wherever it was going.
Sampson hesitated as if she were going to shoot, but then she put her rifle up.
I was drenched with sweat and it was not just coming from the sun’s heat. My nerves were shot. I had no idea how we were going to get out of this situation.
“Hope you got a good look. You and I have probably just been treated to something that nobody’s ever seen.” Sampson chuckled darkly. “Not somebody that lived to tell the tale, that is.”
Several minutes later we came to the end of the row of tents. Sampson gasped.
A moment later, I saw why.
The battle was over.
We had lost.
9
Sampson and I surveyed the scene in silence, each of us pushing into the side of the canvas tent to better hide in the shadow. It seemed like our little section of camp was the only place that still had tents that had not been smashed. Almost every other tent in camp was down. Lurkers roamed through, both on foot and in the air, every now and again receiving fire from one of our soldiers.
It was not long before they were put down.
The sight was disheartening, even though there was probably part of me that had been cheering against my captors.
I can’t afford to think like that. Teammates. These people are my Teammates. I repressed a snort. They might have conscripted me but they are my teammates still the same.
The rat-tat-a-tat of a firearm started up and it was joined by more, apparently several of the soldiers had not gotten the message that the battle was over.
If I’d had working anti-grav boots, I would’ve been on my way out of here, that’s what those guys should’ve been doing instead of continuing a losing fight.
Even more weapons joined and for a brief moment I hoped that we had read the outcome of the battle wrong.
No fewer than seven lurkers jumped in the air and converged on the willful soldiers, firing blasts of light from the lurker’s puny little mess of arms.
The gunfire stopped.
The lurkers continued to fire for another couple of moments before they too pulled back. A fire had started in their wake, lighting up a fallen canvas tent as if it had been a piece of paper touched to a match. Four more crushed tents were soon burning. The lurkers did not seem concerned and went back to roaming through camp, looking for other survivors. The seven that had been in the air stayed there and they were soon joined by others.
“What we do now?” Sampson looked back at me.
“Are your anti-grav boots working?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “I’m not wearing them. The brace would not allow it. These are just regular boots.”
I looked down and noticed that there were some slight differences between what she had on and what I wore, but it was not enough to make me think that the brace couldn’t fit inside her anti-grav boot, but perhaps there was something I was missing.
We waited in silence, each left to our own thoughts.
“You don’t have to stay with me,” she said at last. “Activate your boots and go.”
“I wouldn’t leave you even if I could.” I offered her a lame smile. “My boots don’t work right now, they’ve been disabled.” I hesitated. “They are still training us on them.” I almost asked if they had deactivated hers during training, but refrained because I needed to keep us focused on getting out of here.
I looked at my watch and saw we had been stationary for almost two minutes while we had taken in the total desolation of the camp and the lurkers’ efforts in eradicating survivors.
The lurkers were still going from tent to tent looking for any stragglers. Every now and again blasts of light would leave their mess of tentacles and they would put down the stragglers. It was just a matter of time before they started working on our section of camp. I didn’t know what else to do, but clearly staying here was not going to keep us alive.
Our camp had been set up in the middle of nowhere, making it virtually impossible to escape. If we tried we would be sitting ducks for the lurkers. We would not get far before a lurker found us and took us out. If we’d both had working anti-grav boots, it might have been a different situation, but still, I would not have been willing to take a bet on that. I had not tested the capabilities of my boots and did not know how fast we could go. My instincts told me that the lurkers would be faster.
“Where are your boots?” I asked as quietly as I could while keeping a close eye for approaching lurkers.
“Back in my tent.” She nodded towards the middle of camp. “Over there.”
I covered my surprise because I had expected her to point back the way we had come.
Why wasn’t she in her tent?
“If we found somebody else’s boots would they work?”
I had not seen any human corpses yet, but the camp would be littered with them. It wouldn’t be too much effort to steal some from the dead and give them to her. I could take some too.
“A nice thought, but no, the boots are keyed to the watch, and the watch is keyed to the person. That was one of the things they told us on our first day. You must not have paid very good attention. Didn’t you say you were a lawyer back on earth?” She gave me a curious look as if she was going to say more, but then shook her head.
“We don’t have long,” she said instead. “Try your boots. Maybe they will work.”
I hesitated and was about to argue but it was a simple request and it didn’t hurt to check. I pressed the middle button on the left and the top button on the right, but my boots still did not work. In the back of my mind I heard Jeffords laugh, thinking he would be quite satisfied if he knew of my current predicament.
The lurkers were now all in the air and I was starting to hope that they were about to leave and we would be spared from having to figure out how to survive them.
A ship rose from the south end of camp. I didn’t know where it had come from, it certainly had not been there before.
It rose quickly.
“That’s no lurker ship.” Sampson took a step forward and growled. “That could have been our way out of here.”
“I was over there earlier and saw nothing like it.”
“Didn’t you say you were headed south?” Sampson asked me. “Why did you start there and then come here if that’s where you wanted to be in the first place?”
“Long story.”
“If you say so.”
I could tell that she was now starting to wonder about me. Something in the way she acted told me that if she had an opportunity to flee, she wouldn’t hesitate to leave me behind.
Had the ship been buried under the ground? Was that
why Jeffords had ordered us to evacuate to the south?
The ship moved fast, but the lurkers were faster.
It was several hundred feet in the air by the time one of the lurkers caught up. Instead of firing its blasters the lurker actually latched onto it with its clawed feet. Ten seconds later there were five lurkers.
Twenty seconds later, ten lurkers.
Thirty seconds later, more than twenty. Not all of them had a place to grab hold of the ship, so some watched while others pushed their way in.
The ship’s engines increased in power, but the combined wings of the lurkers were stronger.
They forced it down.
I watched transfixed at the scene, wondering if I would have been on that ship if Jeffords had not ordered me to run a lap.
Was Jeffords in there with the other soldiers from my group? Was Roth in there?
I had a hard time believing she had been killed during all this. I looked at my watch and tried to remember what time the invasion had started.
I gasped when I figured it out.
Has it only been thirty-eight minutes?
Perhaps Jeffords had been hoping to evacuate but had not had the opportunity. If the ship had been hidden in some underground garage, they should’ve waited for the lurkers to go.
Or at least come up with a distraction.
I thought back to the pocket of gunfire that had been dealt with minutes before, and wondered if maybe that had been set up as a distraction but had been handled faster than they figured.
More and more lurkers joined those who were forcing the ship down, hovering if they couldn’t contribute.
Piercing sounds came from the group of lurkers.
“Is that a weapon?” I asked.
Sampson shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen that ship before.”
“It’s a screaming lurker,” I said, resisting the urge to point and realizing that I had spoken a little too loudly. “The ship is firing at it.”