That was why he chided Bayne for doing the exact same thing Marsden had just been thinking about doing, but was secretly pleased that at least someone had done it.
Under three hours had passed since they’d entered the spacecraft, but everything around them seemed changed, like they had someone gone from the harmless, barren world where’d they’d started to some kind of nightmare hellscape. With this impression firmly in mind, they didn’t go down the most direct path to where they had left Dropship Alpha. Instead Marsden directed them to a line of uneven rocks nearby that looked like they would hide their approach for most of the way back.
Everyone stayed quiet, all attempts at witty banter to lighten the mood completely gone. Marsden couldn’t speak for anyone else, but the full weight of how unbelievably awful this mission had been was only now settling on him. The Recon Marines’ small army of private psychologists and therapists would have a field day with those of them, if any, that managed to get off this rock.
Their path kept them pretty well hidden up until the moment where they could see the two dropships. If they went any farther they would lose their cover, but their spot at least afforded them a decent view of what was going on. Dropship Beta had landed a safe distance away from the first dropship, making it harder for them to see, but most of the interesting action seemed to be happening at Dropship Alpha. They could see all three of the remaining infected marines. Singh, the pilot that had come down with Beta was just coming down the gangway from inside. Nooner, the other infected marine, was lifting up some kind of bright blue bubble from the ground. It was one of about twenty of the bubbles, and they all looked strikingly similar to the stasis cages in which the creatures of the Sten-Plus’s ark had originally been kept. Unlike those stasis bubbles from earlier, however, these were all the same size. Marsden wasn’t the only one to notice this.
“Those bubbles look like they’d be just the right size to each hold one of the parasites, don’t you think?” Essentia asked.
“Affirmative,” Axel said. “We’re at approximately a two to one chance that we were right about their plan. They have more of the parasites ready.”
“Definitely more than enough to infect the remaining people on the Franklin Dixon,” Marsden said. “And that’s just the number we can see. We have no idea how many they’ve already loaded inside. They’ve probably been spending most of this time hauling all of them out here to the dropships.”
“If those are the last of them, we don’t have much time left,” Hemingford said.
“No, not much, but still enough to formulate a plan,” Marsden said. “Come on, everyone, quick thinking. What have we got at our disposal and how can we use it?”
“We’ve all got our MH-56s still,” Essentia said, “although ammo is limited. Several side arms and knives…”
“And a whole crapton of explosives,” Axel said.
“Okay, seriously, I’ve got to ask, Axel,” Bayne said. “Where do you even keep all these grenades and charges and thermite strips and whatever?”
“Anywhere they’ll fit.”
Marsden immediately saw how this could go into less than appropriate territory for the situation, and he waved Bayne off from commenting further. “And you’ve still got the detonator for the explosives on the ship?” Marsden asked.
Axel pulled it out and set it on the ground between where they were all crouched. “Right here. I’m ready for the fireworks show whenever you are.”
“We still don’t know how well those are going to work,” Hemingford said. “They might not even make a dent in the power cores.”
“Or they could turn us all into nuclear particles,” Essentia said.
“If the former happens, then too bad,” Marsden said. “We’ll just have to make sure we survive this and come back with a way to wipe it all out for real. If the latter happens, well, I sure don’t want to die any more than any of you, but you have to admit that nuking the entire site would definitely take care of that pesky potential danger to the entire human race.”
“So you want me to trigger it?” Axel asked as she reached for the detonator again. Marsden stopped her hand before it got there.
“No, not yet. Look back at the dropships. See how they’re all working at carrying the bubbles into Dropship Alpha?”
Essentia looked back in that direction. “All except Murakame. She’s off to the side. It looks like she’s pulling out her PDM and is getting ready to send another message to the Dixon.”
“My point is that all of them have put down their weapons to do what they’re doing. For this exact moment, we’re armed and they’re not. They’re also distracted. We have the element of surprise at the moment, and maybe we can even increase that surprise.”
He told them all his plan. As plans went, it wasn’t complex. No one would ever say Marsden should be promoted to the highest ranks of command with simplistic attacks like this. But sometimes simple was the best.
Right as he was finishing, the PDMs buzzed with the news that Murakame was again trying to contact the Dixon. Marsden hesitated for only a moment before using his own PDM to listen in, but he turned down the volume as low as he could while still hearing it. When others moved to do the same, Marsden waved them off. They were far enough away and just hidden enough that Murakame and the others shouldn’t have been able to hear the echo of their message on other nearby PDMs, but Marsden didn’t want to risk it at the moment. In fact, this would be exactly the moment he was hoping for to catch the Thirty-Sevens off guard.
“Come in, Franklin Dixon, this is Murakame,” Murakame said. Yet again, her inflection was less stilted than the time before. Each time she made the effort to communicate with someone else, she sounded more human. To Marsden’s relief, though, the Dixon was already clued in that something was up.
“Murakame, this is del Mar. What the hell is going on down there? Singh wasn’t down for more than a few minutes before we detected a radical change in her vital signs.”
“We’re under attack from the parasite-infected marines,” Murakame said. “Singh was injured. We’re on our way back up. It’s imperative that you attack the site from orbit once we’re almost at the Dixon.”
Del Mar hesitated, and Marsden silently thanked him for keeping his head. While Murakame’s strange vitals might be explained by a battle-induced injury, she had neglected to do anything in the background that would make it actually seem like they were being attacked. There were no bullets flying, no roar of explosions. They hadn’t even powered up Dropship Alpha for flight yet, which would have been standard combat procedure under those circumstances.
Which was all pretty ironic. If Murakame had waited just a few minutes, Marsden and the remains of his group would have already provided them with exactly all that. Instead, now that del Mar’s suspicion was up, it would hopefully stay up even in the ensuing chaos.
Assuming they all survived the initial distraction, that was. Marsden nodded at Axel. “Now.”
The look on Axel’s face was both priceless and disturbing. The term kid in a candy store was too tame for her expression, but there was no mistaking the sheer joy she felt at the prospect of the destruction she was about to cause. With a deep, appreciative sigh that was almost orgasmic, Axel mashed down on the detonator button.
For a few seconds nothing seemed to happen, and Marsden’s hopes fell. Then there was a rumbling in the near distance and, despite warnings Axel had given them not to look at the ship, most of the team couldn’t help but take a quick glance back before turning their heads and shielding their eyes.
The Sten-Plus vessel shook with several loud, high-pitched pops. There were several more seconds, then the front end of the ship erupted in a massive fireball. Like a wave, explosions moved backward over the ship. The spacecraft’s hull rippled and tore as the explosion ripped through everything. Although there was some distance between them and the drop ships, Marsden could feel small, searing pieces of the ship flutter down around them.
The Thirty-Seve
ns ducked, completely caught off guard to suddenly be in exactly the situation they had just lied about to the Dixon. Perfect.
“Now!” Marsden yelled. “Take them out!” The remaining members of his team ran from their hiding spot with their weapons roaring. At this distance they weren’t yet likely to get a direct hit on the Thirty-Sevens, but that wasn’t exactly their goal just yet. All they really needed to do in this exact moment was cause damage. Many of the bullets hit the remaining blue stasis bubbles, and while many of them withstood the onslaught, several burst under the rain of ammunition and exposed the soft, fleshy parasites within. These suddenly became easy pickings as the Recon Marines moved closer.
Both Murakame and Singh ran inside the ship, although Marsden noticed that they did it in weird, backwards crab-walk. That made sense, Marsden realized. It didn’t matter too much to the Thirty-Sevens if their host was damaged. There were other hosts out there, after all. But they couldn’t risk any damage to the fleshy, tumor-like brains on their backs.
“Aim for the parasites themselves!” Marsden called. “That’s their weak spots!” Nooner, instead of running for the safety of the ship, made a beeline for the weapons they had carelessly left sitting on the planet’s surface.
“Marsden!” Essentia yelled.
“Not now, Essentia! We’re a little busy!”
“No, listen! The signal on our PDMs is working again! We can contact the Dixon!”
Marsden ducked for the cover of a rock so he could check to see if what she said was true. Whatever it was that had been blocking their signal, whether it was something on the Sten-Plus ship or something the Thirty-Sevens had been doing themselves, now seemed to be gone. Marsden wasted no time broadcasting a signal to the Franklin Dixon.
“Dixon, this is Marsden! Do not, I repeat, do not listen to anything Murakame says. She, Nooner, and Singh are the ones that are currently infected by the parasites. You cannot let them board the Franklin Dixon! If you do—” His signal suddenly cut off again, and was then replaced by another image of Murakame.
“Dixon, they’re trying to trick you! Marsden and those with him have been compromised! We are the only ones who haven’t been infected. If Marsden makes any attempt to get back on the ship, you shoot him down!”
The Franklin Dixon didn’t make any attempt to send back a message to either of them.
“Seems like the Dixon doesn’t know which one of us to believe,” Hemingford said. “Maybe we should—” His advice was cut off by a line of bullets punching him in the chest, going upward over his neck and turning his face into an unidentifiable ruin. The remaining marines doubled down their attempts on Nooner, who made the unfortunate move of turning just a little too much and exposing his parasite. Bayne got off several shots that shredded through the brain-like mass, and Nooner collapsed. Bayne made sure to keep firing into his body for several seconds just to make sure that the real Nooner wouldn’t just lay there suffering.
In the midst of the firefight, the hatch on Dropship Alpha had begun to close. While there were still plenty of parasites sitting in their protective stasis bubbles on the ground, apparently Murakame had made the decision that the ones they had already taken aboard would be enough.
“Concentrate all fire on Dropship Alpha!” Marsden said. “Try to aim for the engines! We can’t let them take off!”
Axel responded to this in the only way she knew how, by pulling out a grenade, ripping the pin out with her teeth, and then lobbing it with all her might in the direction of the dropship. Her aim was a little off and it missed the engine, but when the grenade went off it looked like some of the shrapnel got caught in the engine. The dropship began to hum, a clear sign that something had gone wrong in its engines, but it still managed to take off just as the hatch completely closed. It hovered in the air for a moment, rocking back and forth, and then slowly rose farther into the air.
As the ship rose out of their range of fire, Marsden, Axel, Bayne, and Essentia stopped shooting and looked balefully up at their escaping target.
“We failed,” Essentia said. “They’re getting away.”
Marsden shook his head, then pointed at Dropship Beta, sitting forgotten off to the side. A couple of small, flaming pieces of the alien spacecraft had landed on it, but it looked to Marsden like it would still be able to fly.
“Not yet, they haven’t.”
August 2, 2147 (Earth Calendar)
2103 Greenwich Mean Time
Location: Interior of Dropship Beta, Bullfinch-2
Marine Heartbeats Detected on Planet: 4
Marsden entered Dropship Beta first and did a quick visual check to see if anything was outwardly wrong with it. The interior lights flickered, which could have been a result of damage from the falling debris, or it could have simply meant that some maintenance robot hadn’t been quick enough to fix the fixtures before the ship had launched. Axel and Essentia were right behind him, with Bayne trailing far behind. Under other circumstances Marsden would have chided him for taking so long, but when Marsden looked back he saw that the big man had the bodies of Nooner and Hemingford draped over his shoulders. When possible, a Recon Marine tried not to leave the body of a comrade behind, and far too many marines today would not be headed back to Earth for a proper burial and funeral service. Given that Marsden couldn’t have the ship take off until he did the most basic flight checks, he was more than willing to let Bayne take the extra time to do this the right way.
“How much time to we have to stop Alpha from reaching the Dixon?” Essentia asked.
“Average flight time of a dropship from takeoff to docking under non-emergency conditions is sixteen minutes, twenty-nine seconds, depending on weather,” Axel said. “The current weather is fair, and Singh will be trying to push the ship to its limits, but we also need to factor in—”
“Axel, we don’t have time for the full calculations,” Marsden said as he ran to the pilot station and started flipping switches before he even sat down. “Just give us your best guess.”
Axel sniffed, as though the entire concept of a “best guess” was offensive to her when she was on a roll, before she said, “Eighteen minutes, eleven seconds.”
“That’s just a guess?” Essentia asked incredulously.
“Yes.”
As the engines whined to life, Bayne came through the open hatchway and deposited the two bodies as reverently as possible on the floor. He then frowned and went back further into the ship before coming back to them. “Hey guys? I think there’s something you need to see.”
“I’m kind of busy here at the moment,” Marsden said. “Can’t you just tell us whatever it is?”
“Sure. This ship is crawling with those brain parasite things.”
“What?” Marsden risked wasting a small amount of time to rush back and see what Bayne was talking about. The way Bayne had said it, he’d expected the creatures to oozing around freely in the back of the troop hold just waiting for someone they could leap on and take over. Instead he found a small pile of the blue stasis bubbles. Apparently Murakame had managed to load a few into this ship as well before Marsden and the others had gotten out of the Sten-Plus ship. “Get them out of here,” Marsden said. “Or at least as many any you can before takeoff. We don’t want any live versions of these things on board the Dixon.”
“Shouldn’t we leave one or two to be studied by the Science Corps?” Essentia asked. “Anything they might be able to learn from them could be important to the survival of humanity if we ever encounter them again.”
Marsden shook his head. “Think about it for a minute, Essentia. For one, we do in fact have a specimen for them to study. It’s just not alive.” Marsden indicated Nooner’s bullet-ridden body and the mangled mass still attached to his back. “Second, while I certainly trust the Science Corps well enough, I don’t trust the rest of humanity. If someone were to get their hands on just one of these things and try to use it as a weapon against some other human faction, imagine how quickly that could get out of
hand. We still don’t know how or how quickly these things reproduce. If the process is easy for them, humanity could still get wiped out purely by the Thirty-Sevens being used carelessly.”
Essentia looked pained but nodded. While Essentia, Axel, and Bayne went about clearing the blue bubbles from the ship, Marsden went back to the pilot station and checked all the readouts. One of the wings had in fact been damaged by the explosion’s debris, but the engines and fuel were in good order. This would not be a smooth ride at all, especially considering how far he needed to push the dropship beyond its suggested limits, but he thought he could do it. Successfully docking with the Dixon afterward could be a problem, but that assumed that they would even make it that far. Who knew? The Franklin Dixon might decide that Dropship Beta did in fact carry infected humans after all and just blow the dropship out of the sky. That was a fun thought, but not one he had time to worry about at the moment.
Once enough of the flight indicators were in the green, Marsden turned and called back to the others. “Is everything all set back there?” He couldn’t immediately see them in the main troop hold, but there shouldn’t have been any reason for them not to hear him. Despite this, they were silent.
No, strike that. Marsden did indeed hear something. It sounded like grunts.
It sounded like there was a struggle.
Marsden ran into the back as he pulled out a side arm with one hand and a knife with the other. All but two of the blue spheres were gone, but those were forgotten for the moment. Essentia was face-down on the floor, struggling to get away as one of the parasites struggled directly over her. It was obvious to Marsden that the creature was trying to take its place on her back and begin the horrific bonding process, but both Axel and Bayne had their hands on the thing, trying to pull it back.
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