“Thought I picked something up,” he said. He shook the arm and listened to it, as if checking the workings of an old wind-up watch. “Guess it was nothing.”
“It probably was nothing, sir,” said Kevin.
“Yeah.”
“Or, alternatively, it may have been that ship.”
A whole series of lights illuminated on Mech’s forearm as a dart-shaped black craft landed nose-down in the dirt a few dozen feet ahead of them with a thunk that shook the trees and sent long, lazy ripples rolling across the watery surface of the swamp.
“Who’s that?” Loren asked, reaching for her blaster.
“Beats me,” said Mech. He raised an arm and folded his hand out of the way of his wrist-mounted cannon. “So, how about we just shoot the shizz out of them and don’t wait around to find out?”
Cal lay slumped on something that he supposed could, given a certain amount of imagination, be described as ‘the ground.’
It wasn’t solid, exactly. Not like proper ground. It was slimy and wet, but with several large and uncomfortable rocks lurking beneath its slick, spongy surface. Still, it wasn’t moving, and it had broken his fall, so ‘ground,’ it was, for now.
His head ached from where he had cracked it on one of the rocks. He nursed it with one hand and supported himself against the wall with the other hand while he slid and slipped his way into a vaguely standing position.
Wait. Wall.
Cal looked up. “Jesus Christ. Another hole?” he said, spotting a vaguely circular edge some twenty feet above him. “What is it with me and holes lately?”
This particular hole was tall and narrow, with barely seven or eight feet between the walls. It was oval-shaped, rather than circular, and Cal didn’t have to look too closely to know that the walls were far too slippery to climb.
He tried to climb, anyway.
“Fonk,” he spat, after he immediately slid down again.
While lying there, he saw the Symmorium Sentience. It was mostly buried in a mossy pool, only its domed top protruding above the sludge. Cal lodged a number of objections as he fished around up to his elbows in the watery gunk, trying to get enough purchase on the smooth orb to pull it free.
“Man, this is frustrating,” he muttered, squelching both hands down past the Sentience’s sides. “You think you could maybe give me a little help? Since, you know, it’s your fault we’re here.”
The Sentience glowed faintly, but its voice failed to echo in Cal’s head.
“Yeah. That’s what I thought,” he said, sighing heavily as he scooped both arms right down beneath the ball.
Grimacing, he leaned back on his knees, letting his weight do the lifting while his hands concentrated on gripping the sphere as tightly as possible.
“Come… on!” he hissed.
And then, parping like a diarrhetic walrus, the Sentience flew free. It sailed up over Cal’s head, slipped from his fingers, and slammed into the wall behind him.
Cal turned to find it buried almost all the way in the sludge. “Son of a…”
He sobbed quietly for a few moments. He’d earned that right.
That done, he skidded and slipped his way up onto his feet and shuffled over to where the Sentience just barely curved out of the wall.
“OK, let’s try that again,” he said, reaching for the orb’s smooth surface.
The Sentience sunk fully into the wall, and the slime oozed down to cover the indent it left behind. Cursing, Cal clawed at the spot where the god-sphere had been, but came away with only handfuls of mud to show for his efforts.
“Shizz,” he groaned, then he tentatively sniffed his hands to make sure that it wasn’t.
Wiping them on his shirt, he looked around. There wasn’t much to see, so he looked up. There wasn’t a whole lot worth looking at up there, either. Just the top of the hole and, quite a distance beyond that, the treetops.
It was about then that Cal heard the sound of blasters firing. He froze, listening to the high-pitched pew-pews, then kicked himself at the wall and tried to scrabble his way to the top.
His grip slipped almost immediately. He slid back down, then launched himself upward again, feet plowing through the slick mud, fingers grabbing desperately for some kind of handhold, but finding none.
Cal landed at the bottom of the hole in a soggy, filthy heap. The sound of gunfire came again. It was faster this time, like some kind of turret firing. Pewpewpewpewpewpew-p-pew!
“Loren? Mech?” Cal called jamming his earpiece deeper into his ear canal. “What’s happening? What the fonk is going…”
The sight of the wall made him hesitate.
“…on?” he whispered.
A line of glowing green crept across the patch of wall that had swallowed the Symmorium Sentience. It appeared as if being painted on by a shaky hand, wobbling a little as it covered nine or ten inches before ending with a little flourish.
Branches grew from this first line, sprouting until they formed lines of their own. From those, new branches formed. They curved and crisscrossed, hundreds of pulsing green strokes, all growing and developing before his eyes until they formed a perfect circle in the mud.
A beam of light emerged, struck Cal in the face, and almost burned his eyes out of his head. He stumbled back, alternating between blinking furiously and jamming the heels of his hands into his eye sockets.
“Fonk. Jesus. What was that for?” he demanded, as the beam went back to being a glowing circle on the wall.
“Apologies, Cal Carver,” said the Sentience. “Apologies, and gratitude.”
The voice was stronger than before. The Sentience was clearly turning on the charm, too, because suddenly Cal didn’t mind that it had almost blinded him.
The gunfire had stopped. Silence had fallen. But it was an uneasy sort of silence that made Cal’s insides knot up in fear.
“It’s fine. Forget it. No harm done.”
“You are a loyal friend, Cal Carver. You have served me well. Even now, my strength returns.”
“Great. That’s great,” said Cal, giving a double thumbs-up to the circle. He pointed up. “Now, could you maybe help—”
“I have your reward.”
Cal raised an eyebrow. “Reward? What kind of reward?”
“The thing you need most of all,” said the Sentience. Its voice had a rumble to it now, that made his teeth vibrate uncomfortably in their sockets.
“Is it a stepladder?” Cal asked, looking up.
“More. Much more.”
Cal considered this. “Two stepladders?”
“No, Cal Carver.”
Cal felt thin roots wrap around his ankles and twist up his legs, binding them together.
“Hey! What the fonk?” he demanded.
A plug of mud spat from the wall, releasing a spray of a thick, viscous green liquid.
Another mud-blob shot out on his other side, like a champagne cork popping free. More of the gloop glugged in, covering the floor of the hole and rising up over his ankles.
The roots had wrapped around his arms now. He wrestled against them, trying desperately to thrash his way free.
More of the liquid came pouring in through half a dozen more holes. It was past his knees now, then up over his waist, then rising past his chest.
“I give you what you truly need, most of all,” the Sentience sounded in his head.
Cal took a deep breath as the liquid rose up over his chin.
“I give you peace.”
Twenty-Seven
Two minutes before Cal took an involuntary slime-bath, the doors to the arrow-shaped landing pod swung outward and a man in an EDI uniform jumped out, a rapid-repeater rifle raised.
“Corporal Tim Blagbrough, Earth Defense Initiative! Everyone on their knees!” was what he had started to say, but Mech shot him dead just before the second ‘o’ in ‘Corporal,’ and so he never got the chance to finish.
For a little while, nothing else had happened. Loren and Mech had equipped wrist-mounted p
ortable energy shields they’d found at the bottom of the armory box, and had watched the dropship through the semi-transparent blue-tinted forcefield, guns aimed squarely at the door.
It was a bad design choice, Mech thought. If you’re dropping into battle, what you don’t want—what you actively do not want—is a single door that opens onto the battlefield, wide enough to allow just one person through at a time.
And, if you did find yourself in such a position, the last thing you would want to do would be to run through said door dressed in the uniform of the enemy and waving a big gun.
“I mean, that’s just common sense, right?” said Mech, after discussing his thoughts on the matter with Loren.
Loren squinted through the energy shield and nodded. “It is.”
A heavy-set man wearing a hydraulic exoskeleton bounded out through the door, twin blaster pistols taking aim at the Currently Untitled’s landing ramp.
“Freeze! Nobod—” he cried, before being cut down in a hail of blaster fire.
“I mean, this is just sad,” Mech said. He looked to Loren. “Ain’t it?”
Loren nodded in reply.
“YEAAAAAAARGH!”
Someone jumped out of the doorway wearing some sort of shoulder-mounted cannon that completely obscured their face. The short drop from the ship caught them by surprise and they tripped as they landed.
“Ooh, shizz,” a female voice said, and then the cannon rapid-fired several hundred blaster bolts directly into the ground, obliterating both it and the woman who landed on top of it.
After a few seconds, the cannon stopped firing.
“This is just fonking sad,” Mech reiterated. He shook his head. “How the fonk did these guys win even a single fight, never mind wipe out whole species?”
Loren’s eyes shrunk. “What?”
“I mean, they’re totally fonking clueless,” Mech said. He deactivated his shield. “Know what? I ain’t even gonna use that. There ain’t no point.”
Loren glanced back into the ship. “Kevin. Do a scan of the area. Any more ships around?”
Silence.
“Kevin?”
Kevin’s voice, when it came, was choked with despair. “I’m so very sorry, ma’am,” he whispered. “They used the airlock. I didn’t see them come in.”
And then, before Loren or Mech could turn, a single powerful blast knocked them off their feet, and sent them tumbling limply into the mud.
Cal floated, still and unmoving, suspended like some prehistoric insect in amber.
He wasn’t dead. Not in the traditional sense, at least. Although, nor was he exactly alive in the traditional sense. He was somewhere between the two, balanced perfectly between everything and nothing.
As he floated, he dreamed.
He dreamed of a child who changed the world. Changed the galaxy.
He dreamed of a boy becoming a man, of a dream becoming a nightmare, of a lie becoming a truth.
It was a truth that would be trumpeted with great aplomb by those who had created it, and spoken of in fearful whispers by those who had not.
But it was a lie. A twisted, insidious lie. Cal saw that now. He saw everything.
The boy. His hope. His betrayal.
His legend.
Cal floated, still and unmoving, like some prehistoric insect trapped in amber.
The dream ended. The vision passed.
Cal floated.
And then, Cal moved.
“A Symmorium and a Greyx,” scoffed Lieutenant Frank Tallon of the EDI Advanced Protection Division. “As I live and breathe. I thought we’d killed all those things?”
He poked the unmoving Tyrra with a foot. She lay sprawled on the mud where she had been thrown, her eyes gazing vaguely up at the sky above. The battle still raged there, tiny streaks of color zipping to and fro as Zertex and the EDI ships slugged it out.
“Looks like this one ain’t got long left,” he said. “Still, those teeth’ll make a fortune on eBay. Symmorium’s a hot market right now. They love all that rare shizz. Those teeth’ll fly, mark my words.”
A few feet away, the hair on the back of Mizette’s neck stood on end. She was on her knees between Loren and Mech, a dozen blasters covering each of them from a range of directions.
“If you hurt her, I’ll kill you,” Miz hissed.
Tallon chomped the end of a cigar between his teeth, drew deeply on it, then smirked at Miz as he placed a boot on Tyrra’s chest and pressed her deeper into the mud.
Miz snarled. Her claws extended. The butt of a rifle cracked across the back of her skull, and twelve different fingers tightened on twelve different triggers.
“Miz, don’t,” Loren whispered. “Don’t.”
Mizette’s chest heaved. Her muscles strained with the effort of holding herself back. Her eyes darted across the faces of the EDI soldiers and to the guns in their hands. There was no way she could get to all of them. Hell, she might not get any of them before she was cut down.
Ugh. Lame.
Miz sunk back onto her knees and lowered her gaze. Satisfied, Tallon took his boot off the girl’s chest and went back to pacing back and forth in front of the captives.
“Would you like to know where you went wrong?” he asked, his eyes boggling gleefully beneath his wild white eyebrows. He didn’t bother to wait for an answer. “You made the same mistake as all the others. You underestimated us. You think humans and you think, ‘Those losers? Those new kids on the block? They’re nothing to worry about!’”
He took another puff of his cigar, stopped in front of Mech, and rocked on his heels. “It is, isn’t it, Robbie? That’s what you think.”
“Who the fonk is Robbie?” Mech grunted.
Tallon grinned broadly. “You know. The robot.” He brought his hands up, fingers together, and did a brief robot dance. “Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!”
“Uh, sir,” began one of the troops behind him. “That isn’t—”
“I know who the fonk it is,” Tallon spat, rounding on the man. Despite the fact he was larger than the lieutenant and packing a powerful blaster rifle, the soldier shrank back.
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
Tallon eyeballed him for a moment, then turned back to find Mech glowering up at him. “I ain’t no fonking—”
“Exterminate! Exterminate!” laughed Tallon. “R2D2, it is you, it is you!”
Tallon laughed again, then took his cigar from his mouth. He looked for somewhere to stub it out, then leaned over and ground the end of it against Mech’s shoulder, holding eye contact the whole time. “Thank you, Robbie,” he said. “Much obliged.”
With a wink, he straightened, slipping the cigar into the breast pocket of his uniform.
His pacing resumed.
“So, just like everyone else, you assume that because we’re relative newcomers out here in the black, we pose no real threat. And, just like everyone else, you were wrong.”
He stopped in front of Loren this time. “You know how long I’ve been a soldier? Thirty-seven years. Thirty-seven years in service to my country. And, laterally, to my planet.”
His voice became a growl. “Look at me when I’m talking to you.”
Loren, who had been watching Tyrra, raised her eyes to Tallon’s. “Aw, sweetheart. Why so blue?” he asked, eliciting sniggers from some of his men.
He went back to pacing. “Thirty-seven years. And that’s just me. The human race? Well, we’ve been fighting for a long time. A long time. There were some centuries where it was all we would do. Invade, kill, conquer, repeat. Invade, kill, conquer, repeat. We’re good at it. Real good. Hell, maybe it’s the only damn thing we’re good at.”
He pointed with the unlit cigar to Mech, Miz, and Loren in turn.
“Invade. Kill. Conquer. Repeat.”
His smirk was a cold, mirthless curve across his face. “You alien morons didn’t stand a chance.”
Mech hated to admit it, but the guy was right. He had underestimated them. Only an idiot would drop a
landing ship directly in front of the enemy then come running out one at a time, but having spent so long in Cal’s presence, Mech had pretty much taken it for granted that humans were idiots, and so hadn’t suspected a thing.
The other ships came in quietly and without drawing attention to themselves. They’d infiltrated the Untitled and caught them off-guard. He’d let himself be surprise-attacked by human beings.
Man, that stung.
The one consolation was that he wasn’t entirely convinced that the person who had led the attack part was actually human at all.
He stood apart from the others, his back to the crew as he gazed into the darkening woods. The sun was sinking toward the distant horizon, lengthening the man’s shadow until it reached into the trees like a dark probing finger.
The crew hadn’t been formally introduced to him, but they didn’t have to be. They’d seen him before, back in the Mustard Mines on Moktar, and his distinctive fashion sense made him easy to pick out in a crowd.
Manacle, Enslaver of Worlds, turned to them, the waning sun reflected in the visor of his helmet. He stalked, sure-footed as a predator through the mud, the bottom of his cape swishing just an inch or so above the uneven carpet of filth.
The soldiers parted to let him through, keeping their weapons trained on their three targets. Loren had made twenty-four troops in front of them, and caught a glimpse of roughly the same again behind before a grasping hand had caught her head and forced her to face front.
Manacle’s boots squelched to a stop a few feet from where Mech, Loren, and Mizette knelt. Tallon shuffled back a pace, either worried he might catch something, or making sure he was beyond the immediate reach of Manacle’s arms.
“Where is it?” Manacle asked. His voice was surprisingly soft, with a hint of an electronic hum between each letter.
“Where’s what?” Mech asked.
Manacle’s head tilted a fraction. A soldier behind Mizette slammed the butt of his gun against the back of her head.
“Ow! Like, what the fonk?”
“I will try again,” Manacle said. The twin suns reflected in the lenses of his mask were eclipsed when he took a step closer and looked down at the captives before him. “Where is the Symorrium Sentience?”
Space Team- The Collected Adventures 4 Page 56