by Geoff Brown
He jumped as quick footsteps clopped behind him. The colonel nearly bowled him over in her rush to reach the weapon. She thrust her hips against the butterfly grips and grabbed the charging handle on the right side. With a terrified groan, she hauled back with all the weight her tiny frame could muster and racked the weapon.
She immediately leapt away, dropping to her ass. “Now, Sergeant!”
Sergeant Lancell dropped behind the weapon, jerked the grips to his chest and depressed the button.
Gouts of grey dust kicked up in a straight line to the alien’s side and a second later its midsection exploded as the armor-piercing rounds cut it in half. Sergeant Lancell’s adrenaline turned the powerful kicks into a gentle vibration against his torso as he walked the concrete eruptions forward, into the next alien. Several of them stopped and turned, confused by the new threat. He took advantage of their hesitancy and turned his death-spitting flesh-pulper on them.
“Get her! Someone get her now!” Sergeant Lancell screamed in between bursts.
Private Holiday, jumped from the ship’s ramp, his short Mohawk bouncing as he hauled ass across the hangar, carbine in hand. He slid to Beast’s side on his knees like some kind of action movie hero and unloaded his rifle at the aliens. Dropping the magazine, he threw her arm over his shoulder and stood.
It took more effort than Holiday had assumed, gauging by the slow squat-thrust he used to lift her. Two more men raced to him, helping share the load as they carried her toward the ship.
Sergeant Lancell noticed the red glow of the barrel just as he watched the aliens take cover for the first time since their attack. A smile crept across his face and he yelled.
“Have a taste, you sons’a bitches!”
There was a flash of brown beside him and he turned his head to see the colonel booking it back across the bay to the ship.
“Shit.” Sergeant Lancell fired off another burst at a brave invader that stuck its bug-like head out from behind a crate and then he bolted after the officer.
“Lift off! Lift off!” he yelled, vaulting over the rail and up the loading ramp.
The ship lifted into the air and the roof opened to allow their exit. The ramp in back closed and after a few minutes the on-board AI appeared on a screen. In a surreal moment, the digitized human bust politely advised them of the safety protocols in the same manner as the AI flight attendants in commercial crafts and announced that they would be breaking orbit in five minutes. The advanced, self-learning operating system that precisely guided them off-world and toward the nearest transit station urged them to remain strapped in and cautioned them on tomfoolery while in the gravity-free environment of space minutes after they escaped from deadly, metallic alien abominations. The safety briefing ended with some forgettable AI-inspired wise-crack as the ship broke free of the planet’s gravity and entered space.
The crew exhaled for what felt like the first time.
“Sergeant Lancell.”
The sergeant looked over to the voice. The red-haired soldier’s face peeked out from inside a Zero-G medical containment suit that kept her blood from floating about the interior of the ship. She nodded at him. “Thank you.”
“Hey, I’m the one who ran out and grabbed you.” Private Holiday was strapped in beside her and looking the soldier over. “Also, please don’t bleed to death inside that giant condom, because I would really love to take you out for a beer for saving all of our asses back there.”
The soldier looked over at the private and gave him an awkward half-smile. “My wounds have already closed up, so the danger of bleeding out is slim at this point. However, I have sustained tremendous injury. If you do not mind, Sergeant, I am going to drop consciousness for a while to let my body recuperate faster. Don’t be alarmed by my deathly appearance, my Pilot is monitoring my vitals. I will be fine.”
Sergeant Lancell stared at her for a moment, trying to comprehend her words. He glanced at the colonel, who shrugged. “Uh… carry on, soldier.”
She gave him another nod and then closed her eyes, quickly drifting to sleep and growing pale.
Private Holiday looked on in horror. “Oh my god, is she a robot?” He scanned her up and down and then turned away with a smile. “Nope, don’t even care if she’s a robot. We’re dating.”
* * *
Max scanned the room and the surrounding eighty yards five times before pulling out his bed and activating the wall safe behind his headboard. He shut off all power to his apartment appliances and routed it to the headset that plugged into the wall port. A glass of whiskey and 400 milligrams of Polycodone relaxed him enough to endure the thin, shaky neural link his home-engineered Chair would establish for him.
Max breathed through clenched teeth as the connection linked. “Where are you?”
Outskirts of the Corthax region. I’ve whipped these metal buggers into a frenzy; they’re ready to go on Warpath with humanity. They just need a ride. How did our Beast do?
“She’s still alive, thankfully. With everything we’ve been through; all those men and women that died at Preston… losing Nikki would have made it so much worse.”
The fallen at Fort Preston did not die in vain, Shogun. We showed humanity they cannot rely on AI technology as their sole defense… and we sent a message to Central Command that the ASH soldiers cannot be discarded and thrown in the ashes of the old world. We did this for the sixty-seven that died ingloriously, with no memorial. With this new war, we will finally have a purpose.
Max’s smile was all teeth. “Command is already pulling in all the others from whatever outskirt posting they’ve been stuck at for the last fifteen years. The stored embryos are being thawed; I’ve already been placed in charge of overseeing training of the second generation of ASH Soldiers. Even Minister Dawn was forced into a concession after Nikki’s successful evacuation on Preston… saving so many in that hellhole. By the time your new friends start invading populated locations, we’ll have enough ASH Soldiers to push them back and secure our future in the eyes of the public. Then, when we’re on every civilized planet, we’ll bring you back, to take command of your sisters, my dear Ryoko.”
Human Strain
Benjamin Cheah
As the hunters fell upon him, Sergeant Major Abel Santiago prayed his instincts were right.
They appeared so swiftly, so silently, it was as though they had grown from the shadows at the end of the tunnel. Their skins colored in midnight hues, Santiago saw them only as moving blurs. Pressed against the wall, he counted the outlines. Two, three, four, eight, twelve. This wasn’t an ordinary patrol. It was a reconnaissance in force.
Santiago breathed as deeply as he dared. If they were going to pass over him, it wouldn’t do if he passed out. If they were going to attack him, he needed oxygen to fight. To flee.
“Boss, what’s the call?” a voice whispered in his head. It was Staff Sergeant Sera Meyers, his second-in-command.
Santiago swallowed, mind-keyed his quantum communicator, let his suit translate his thoughts into words. “Stay put. Let them pass, but prepare for the worst.”
“Acknowledged.”
The rest of his team were spread out behind him. They had cover. Little nooks and debris to hide behind or under. All Santiago had was the wall. If anyone was going to be detected, it was him. But if they passed over him, they were safe.
Santiago adjusted his position just so, pressing his chest against the wall, turning his head to watch the hunters. His suit’s active camouflage layer shifted, mimicking the colour and texture of the wall. Every fibre of his being screamed that he was giving his back to them. But as so many people had learned the hard way, hunters were likelier to recognize the front profile of a human under active camouflage than the back. Not that his animal brain was convinced.
They came.
Half of their number crawled along the floor on all fours. The other half traversed the ceiling, inverted. This close, he heard the sound of their passage. Claws going click-click-click, tails swishing softly, the a
lmost inaudible thuk as their adhesion pads engaged and disengaged. They were closer, closer, closer.
One of them broke off, taking to the wall. Right in front of Santiago. It approached him, beheld him. Its skull was a smooth dome interrupted by a line of dark unblinking eyes. Massive jaws jutted out under its head. The hunter growled, raising a paw lined with sharp claws. Mounted under its wrist was a personal laser. Lifting its tail, Santiago saw it terminate in a fine, almost invisible, stinger.
Nothing to see here, all you are seeing are bits of circuitry and wires, go away.
The hunter stared at him, perhaps running through its sensor suite, trying to reconcile multiple anomalous data sets. Santiago kept still. He had to keep still. Hunters roamed in packs, and they would not, could not, stray from their packs. He just had to hold on.
The hunter cocked its head and noticed its pack-mates scampering off. It took to the floor and raced to catch up.
Santiago remembered to breathe. Softly. The last of the hunters had passed. And if they passed over him...
“FUUUUUUUUUUUUUAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGHH!”
“Hold position!” Santiago q-commed. “Do not engage!”
The men held position.
Crunching, chewing sounds bounced off the walls.
Santiago waited.
Breathed.
Ten minutes later, he stepped away and looked around. The hunters were gone.
“All clear,” Santiago said. “Who was it?”
“Lenny,” Meyers replied.
“You saw what happened?”
“A hunter poked him. He moved.”
Santiago sighed. Goddammit. Before the Hivers came Lenislaw was a civilian. He had made his bones in the Resistance but he had no place among the Rangers. Lenislaw hadn’t been conditioned to iron discipline the way Santiago was. This was supposed to be an all-Ranger operation, but Central said there were too few Rangers left.
“Distribute his load. Five minutes.”
“Roger.”
Santiago knelt, bringing his M592 gravitic accelerator carbine to his shoulder, and kept watch. Five and a half minutes later, Meyers spoke.
“We’re done.”
“Form up. Move out.”
“And the remains?”
“Mark them on your map. We’ll come back for him later.”
It was a polite fiction and they knew it. If the Hivers wouldn’t take the corpse the rats would. But Santiago, Meyer, and the rest of the team were only human, and they needed that last inch of faith in their fellow humans.
The tunnel ended in a metal door recessed into the wall. They stacked up, weapons at the ready. Meyers inspected the frame for traps and alarms. Grabbing the doorknob, she turned. Pulled.
Beyond was once a bustling concourse. Now there was simply darkness. Santiago lowered his enhanced vision monocular over his left eye and the world filled with false colour. The shops were shuttered forever. Glowing mould and alien roots covered the ceiling and walls. Water dripped and gathered in dank corners. Santiago gently swept debris away with his boots, ears primed for errant noise.
At the end of the concourse was another door to another tunnel. It led to a staircase that spiralled down to darker depths. A gentle hum filled Santiago’s ears. He peeked over the railing, aiming his M592 down.
All clear.
Keeping to the outer edge of the stairs, they descended the creaking steps. Santiago kept his eyes open for lasers, motion detectors, ultrasonics, magnetics, even simple tripwires. There was no telling how the Hivers would secure this route.
At the bottom of the stairs, a door awaited. Its hinges had rusted, the frame welded shut. The third man on the team, Rook, aimed his forearm-mounted nanospray and squirted, generously slathering the frame. He stepped clear.
“Breaching,” he called.
Blinding light banished the dark. The metal melted, and the door fell. A gentler light flooded through the doorway. Santiago stepped through, the monocular automatically reverting to real-sight.
The corridor beyond was white. Clean. Sterile. Santiago pulled up his maps on the monocular and picked a waypoint. In his augmented vision, a thick green line grew at his feet and snaked down the passageway.
Navigating a labyrinth of white corridors, he followed the line to a pair of unmarked doors. Santiago and Rook took one door; Meyers and the last Resistor took the other.
Santiago held up three fingers. Dropped one. Another. The last.
Meyers nodded.
Santiago dropped his fist, shouldered his carbine, and opened the door.
A man wearing spotless blue overalls spun around. His hands were empty, his face slack, his eyes set. His pupils were unnaturally dilated, the sclera an empty white.
Santiago shot him in the face.
The thrall’s head caved in. Santiago fired again and again until it dropped. Turning his back to the nearest wall, he scanned the room. This was a target-rich environment, full of blue-uniformed thralls. Santiago aimed at the closest and cut loose. The M592 whined, the clack-clack of the moving bolt louder than the bullet in flight.
Caught in the crossfire, the thralls dropped, twitching. Santiago checked for more targets, saw Rook on the ground grappling with a thrall. The Hiver flipped Rook onto his back, mounting him. Rook’s dagger flashed in his hand, stitching into the target again and again and again, to no effect. The thrall brought a fist crashing down. Rook rolled, guiding the fist into the floor. The tile powdered. The Hiver reared up and Santiago drilled it twice in the face.
“Clear!” Santiago called.
“Clear!” Meyers agreed.
Rook coughed. “Shit. There went the element of surprise.”
Santiago nodded. Shattered circuits and snapped wires flowed out of the broken heads, carried by pseudo-blood and whatever was left of their organic brains. Like all Hivers, the thralls were networked to every other Hiver in the area. The rest of the swarm would come. Soon.
The corpses smoked and hissed. Santiago stepped back as their skin blackened and crisped, their limbs curled, tendons snapped. Then in a flash of blue light they disintegrated, leaving smoking puddles on the floor.
Meyers extracted a scanner from a pouch, running it over Rook. “You’ve been tagged,” she said.
Hivers sprayed targets with pheromones in close proximity, marking them for other Hivers. Some variants mixed in different chemicals, with less pleasant effects.
“Meyers, Rook, exterior security,” Santiago said. “Clean up as best as you can. Ismail, you’re up.”
Meyers and Rook left the room. Ismail set down and opened his heavy haversack.
Santiago surveyed the room. The walls were lined with computers, most of which he had no idea how to use. He did, however, recognize a dataport. He removed a memory stick from a utility pouch and plugged it in. The tip of the stick glowed red.
Windows lined the control room. Beyond, Santiago saw a sprawling assembly line. Assemblers digested raw materials and alchemized them into feedstock. The fabricator turned the feedstock into goods, rolling them out for collection and storage. Robots scurried around the assembly lines, performing a thousand different tasks. Before the War, this was the largest, most sophisticated underground fabricator on the planet, capable of producing almost anything the programmers could dream of. Santiago pressed his hands against the glass, allowing himself to believe that one day true humans would possess such a fabricator again, that in some not-too-distant future it could produce the goods they needed to reclaim the land and sky.
Ismail hauled the Special Demolition Munition from his bag and dashed Santiago’s hopes forever.
“SDM ready,” Ismail said. “Just give me the word.”
“Roger.”
Santiago watched the memstick. It contained a limited artificial intelligence, closer to a search engine than a true AI. The AI scoured the fabricator’s databanks, copying a treasure trove of Old World knowledge. Most of it would be useless. But the Hivers were running the fabricators now, producing the cy
bernetics and biomechatronics that defined them. If there was any hope of understanding the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses, it lay in the stick.
The memstick turned green.
Santiago pulled it. “We’re done. Ismail, set the timer for thirty minutes.”
It pained him to give the command. But the Hivers had to believe this was a demolition, not a data extraction.
CLUNK
“What was that?” Ismail asked, closing the SDM’s control panel.
“Came from above us.”
CLUNK-CLUNK.
Not a hunter. They weren’t that clumsy. But it was coming closer. Santiago plugged the stick into a suitport and powered up his q-com. Tuning it to a channel reserved for the mission, he began uploading the contents of the stick. Now they just needed to survive long enough for Central to receive its contents.
“Coming out,” Santiago called.
“Come out,” Meyers replied.
The team regrouped outside.
CLUNK
“That came from the ceiling,” Meyers said.
“We have to—”
Five feet away a ceiling vent opened. A large cube dropped down, slowing into a mid-air hover . Klaxons screeched. The cube pulsed multi-coloured lights in rapid patterns. As Santiago shut his eyes and turned away, the walls and floor around the cube cracked, buckled, and exploded.
Chunks of ferromagnetic material gathered around the cube, twisting and separating and re-forming into springs, cogs, legs, arms, claws. It rolled, crawled, walked towards them.
“Golem!” Meyers yelled.
Rook hosed the construct with full auto fire. The intense gravity fields around the golem assembler snatched the rounds out of the air and repurposed them as mass.
“Run!” Santiago shouted.
They fled, retracing their route. The golem graduated to long, loping bounds, each step a heavy thud. Santiago rounded a bend…
The corridor was filled with thralls. All were armed with improvised weapons: clubs, knives, engineering tools.
Santiago turned up his GAC to full power and fired. His first round blew a hole clean through the nearest thrall, and into two more behind. He worked the crowd with short bursts in full auto. The team took his cue, mincing up the thralls as they surged forward. The wall of flesh fell before them.