by Geoff Brown
I turned to stare at the rocks. “I loved you as best I could. I just had to… had to return to my men. Return to the only job I’ve ever been good at.”
“Blowing shit up and breaking things,” she said, using the words I’d so often used to describe my daily activities. But she left one part of it out.
“And killing people.” I sighed. “Can’t forget that. Listen, Suzie, I’m sorry for everything.”
She shook her head. “Don’t apologize. You came back for me. You were here when I needed you. I think being around you I felt more sane than any other time after…” Then she shrugged the nub of her missing arm.
“And you won’t tell me how it happened.”
“I don’t want that to define me.”
I thought about the nature of memories and how they could affect a person and reluctantly understood her logic. So I didn’t push her. Instead, I stared out at the ocean, letting the breeze heal me.
“What were you doing in the beginning?” she asked after a while.
“In the beginning? Probably minding my own business.”
“No. You told me when you first joined OMBRA… what was it you were doing?”
Ah, that I remember well. I was dressed in black, hugging the frame of the Vincent Thomas Bridge thinking it was my love of movies that made me want to kill myself there. Not only had the bridge been the filming location for such movies as Gone in Sixty Seconds, Lethal Weapon 2, To Live and Die in LA and The Island, but it had also been the place director Tony Scott had chosen to commit his own suicide. He’d directed Top Gun, True Romance, The Last Boy Scout and Man on Fire, four of my top ten favorite movies of all time. Each of those movies featured a man who’d once been on top of his game, broken, in need of redemption. In each of those movies, Tony Scott had found a way to redeem them. But in the end, much like Tony Scott had come to realize, not everyone was redeemable. Not everyone was the hero of his own movie. So just as Tony Scott had decided to remove himself from the film of life, so had I… that is until Mr Pink stepped into it and convinced me to join OMBRA.
“I was trying to kill myself.”
“Why were you doing that?” she asked.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. Which was true, but she deserved a better answer than that. “I had too much going on in my brain. I couldn’t make it stop. It was just so overwhelming.”
She nodded, adding, “No matter what you did, your brain kept trying to figure it out by replaying over and over what it had seen.”
“Yes. It was like a computer that was so overloaded with programs that it needed to be reset.”
“The ultimate reset,” she said. “How to control-alt-delete your life.”
I stared out at the Pacific, the water crashing against the cliff beneath us and realized why she’d wanted to come. Mother had known all along, as had Black Johnson only I hadn’t listened. My heart sank into my stomach. “That’s what we’re doing here, isn’t it?” I asked the obvious question, if only to put it into real words. “You want to control-alt-delete.”
She sighed as a wave crashed below. “WWWSD? He’d control-alt-delete.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Sure I do. Look at how he was at the end of The City on the Edge of Forever. When he let Joan Collins die, he could barely live with himself. Of course, he couldn’t really do what he wanted to do. That was the last episode of the first season. If they ever wanted another season, he’d just have to deal with it. So really, they cheated.”
She was right of course. Kirk was passion incarnate. No other character perhaps in the history of television wore his heart so far up his sleeve. My only hope was she wouldn’t mention Rayna, but that hope was dashed in her next words.
“Then there was Requiem for Methuselah. He’d fallen so in love with Rayna that he didn’t want to live without her, despite the fact she was an android. Remember what he did?”
I stared out at the water hating William Shatner as I said, “He had Spock erase his memory. Vulcan mind meld.”
“Control-alt-delete. Return to earlier iteration.”
“One in which he’d never known Rayna.”
A wave crashed far below.
“Do you remember before you left? Do you remember our date at Grauman’s Chinese Theater?” she asked.
“We saw Matrix Reloaded,” I said.
“And invented the WWWSD game,” she said.
“You know you can’t go back, right? We aren’t computers. Our life is a straight line from birth to death.”
“Maybe somewhere I can find it. Maybe somewhere I can go back. All I know for now is I can’t find it here. This timeline is set.” Then she turned and smiled – an honest to god smile from the before time as if nothing had ever happened to her… to us. It was so true, so powerful, so infectious, I couldn’t help but smile in return. Then she nodded, waved at me once with her right hand, then leapt.
My heart stopped and my mouth opened, but I didn’t watch her fall. I didn’t see what happened. One minute she was there, the next she wasn’t. We were too high for her to survive. The rocks and the waves were too unforgiving. But then again, so was life. What would William Shatner do? He’d kill himself and hope to come back in a less complicated time. He’d proven so with Rayna.
What was I to do? Was I to be next… go back to the place it had all begun, me ready to jump from the Vincent Thomas Bridge? To end it all just like Tony Scott had? Should I join her?
WWWSD?
WWWSD?
WWWSD!
I screamed into the wind.
Fuck that game!
Fuck William Shatner!
I grabbed my ruck and turned to go. Then I paused, hurling it to the ground. I wasn’t going to jump… that I knew… but I wanted desperately to see below, wanted to check and see if she’d died, hoping she’d somehow survived the impossible. I balled my fists and shook my head hard enough to become dizzy. Bo. I knew better. She knew better. She’d orchestrated it perfectly. She’d said as much, making sure the last image I wanted to see of her was a live one, of her truly happy, and not one where she was tossed and battered on the rocks.
WWWSD?
He’d move on, just like he always did.
He’d leave the scene of the drama, return to the captain’s chair and log it.
Yeah.
He’d do that.
He always did that and things turned out all right.
And I guess, so would I.
I wiped the moisture from my eyes, picked up my ruck, and headed back to where’d I’d come, or at least to where I’d been.
All ahead full.
Aye, Aye, Captain.
Prepare for warp drive.
Aye, Aye, Captain.
Engage warp drive.
Scout Mission
Jack Hillman
“All right, you apes. Lock and load.” Gunny's voice rasped in my right ear over the comm link. “LZ in thirty seconds. Let's hit the dirt running for a change.”
I checked the magazine on my weapon and flipped on the laser sight, not that I expected to be using it much. The comm was working, proved by mumbled comments from the rest of the squad coming through in a low rumble. I ran a quick check of the pouches on my belt and vest, checking extra ammo, explosives and backup weapons. I was as ready as the next guy. Unfortunately, I was at the end of the line and there was no next guy.
The sled hit atmosphere at an angle and quickly dropped to come in low over the hilltops, brushing the feathery vegetation and avoiding the anti-ack fire and scanners. By the time we down, a clearing had been scorched out of the valley by our antipersonnel lasers, and wisps of smoke whipped away as the sled grounded. The sides lifted in their gull-wing sequence and all ten of us rolled out at once and scattered to the edges of the clearing. Five seconds after grounding, the sled lifted up, headed for high atmosphere and its spot as our observation post and comm relay, watching our backs.
We were still scanning the brush for enemy warriors when t
he flash and concussion of the explosion made us look up. Pieces of sled rained down over several hundred square meters.
“Shit, we're in it now,” I heard over the comm in an echo of my own thoughts.
“All right, assholes, move out. James take the point. Harris, you got the back door.” Gunny swept the clearing with a hard look, knowing what we were all thinking. “First the mission, then we go home,” Gunny stated.
The squad moved out with our observer, Lt Randolph, tucked between two troopers, as if it would keep him any safer. Randolph was nominally in charge due to his rank, but we all looked to Gunny for our orders. I watched the squad move out and waited my turn at the end of the line.
“Richards, get moving,” Gunny called out over the link.
I looked at Richards, crouched to scan the brush. He didn't move. Gunny went over and carefully tapped him on the shoulder – you never knew what a new grunt would do his first time out in combat.
Richards just fell over and I could see the viper thorns stuck in his thigh. Gunny and I looked at each other for a moment. Then he pulled the tags from the body and set the timer on the disposal charges. He followed the line of troopers down the trail, me on his heels. We were out of sight of the clearing when the blast of heat bounced off the hillside, reducing Richards and his equipment to ash on the wind.
One down.
We traveled for better than an hour before Gunny called a break. Three times Cutter had to lop the heads off cane snakes as they reached down for James. Twice I dropped a minibomb down the dome holes of fire beetles, plugging the horde inside after the scouts entered to report our presence. If those one-inch bugs boiled out of their nest, they would devour anything that fought back. Digging in through the exposed face and hands, the creatures could strip a man to his armor in less than a minute, leaving not even bones to mark the death, as they consumed anything organic.
Once Billings slapped the observer's hand away from a lace orchid. He motioned Randolph to watch as he touched the end of a cigarette he pulled from his pocket to the lovely blossom. You could hear the hiss of acid as the tobacco dissolved, feeding its nutrients to the flower. Billings tossed the butt into the center of the blossom to feed the lovely bloom and they both watched the remains dissolve. It was just another reminder this wasn't Earth, and more than just the natives were unfriendly.
As we sat around in the brush, in sight of each other and watching behind our neighbors as we caught our breath, Gunny went through the specs again with the observer.
“Okay, here's how it goes,” Gunny said to us when he was done with Randolph. “We approach the Thorn site, get Lieutenant Randolph here close enough to use his fancy toys, get the intelligence, and then head for the backup LZ. OPs know we're out here with our asses in the wind but they want what Randolph will give them so they will have a pickup arranged.” He stared us all down, quashing any objections. “Once we make contact with the site, we button down. No unnecessary noise or movement. They may be Thorns, but they still have surveillance equipment as good as ours. With any luck, we get Randolph back and we don't have to do this shit anymore.” We all looked at each other and laughed quietly. “Okay, okay. I don't believe it either,” Gunny added. “But that's the line from the brass. Harris, you take point this time since you've seen one of these sites before. Let's get moving people.”
We started off through the brush, carefully avoiding anything that looked like a trail. I kept my eyes open, knowing we were fighting the jungle as well as the Thorns. It had been like this of late: Thorns flew over one of our planets and seeded the atmosphere with their life forms. We dropped in and tried to contain the infection before it got out of hand. Only on this planet, the Thorns had knocked out the communications first, giving them better than a year to get set up and build their ‘homestead’. The first we poor humans knew of the invasion was when a supply ship dropped into orbit and barely made it back out again after lasers took out their landing shuttle. Six months it had taken the supply ship to limp back to base on one rocket and a prayer.
Now our team was supposed to find a way to stop the Thorns. That was just our name for them. Their own name was more like Kruk't Kr'n T'Or' Urnz, which translated roughly as ‘Brothers To All Growing Things’, or some such crap. Which was, of course, why we called them Thorns. We were in a war for all the prime oxygen-based real estate at this end of the galaxy, and right now, the Thorns were winning this planet by the simple method of planting seeds. Considering they were more than part plant, it made sense. Trying to talk to them in diplomatic terms had about as much success as convincing your front lawn not to grow more than four inches high. You still had to mow them down every once in a while. But this lawn fought back.
A scream cut through the jungle sounds. I crouched and froze, scanning the brush in front for Thorns before I looked over my shoulder. Cutter and Jonesy were behind me scanning left and right. Nothing showed. It wasn't a diversion... this time.
Thirty meters back, Gunny was carefully lifting the edge of a mat of leaves and twigs. Two huge eyes showed briefly before James emptied a clip into the toad inside the hole. The toad was one of the Thorns favorite predators and had all the worst qualities of a snake's poisonous fangs and a toad's long tongue. The quiet rattle of the suppressed weapon barely ruffled the silence of the forest. The stench as the toad exploded, stung my eyes and wormed its way into my gut, making me gag, but the smell would keep other predators away for a while. We couldn't leave that creature behind us. They ran in loose packs and anyone that found enough food for more than itself would call others together to hunt their prey. Gunny reached in to snag a set of tags. I looked around to see who was missing and couldn't find Brock.
Two down.
Gunny motioned to me and I started off again, everyone paying extra attention to the jungle. It was quiet for the next hour… if you didn’t count snakes, venomous insects, carnivorous plants and an occasional animal predator that took one look at us and slipped quietly into the brush. When we came to the ridge near the Thorn center I halted the squad and moved up alone.
There was a small, blue-flowered plant growing near every Thorn sensor that released a cloud of acrid gas if disturbed. It was a dead giveaway for the location of the sensors but required a special touch to keep from setting them off. I disabled the sensors along that section of the ridge with inert caps and moved forward. Somewhere on a Thorn control board, sensors were repeating their last five minutes of readings in an infinite loop I hoped the Thorns wouldn't notice.
When we reached the edge of the compound, we circled around Randolph, just outside the edge of the clearing, and let him do his thing. Sensors built into his vest and pack gave in-depth readings of the Thorn control center and whatever it was it pumped out. We needed to know how they controlled the growth of their plants, their creatures in order to make our defenses more efficient. This whole setup was a Garden of Eden to homesteading Thorns. I guess they liked their flowers with a bite. But to the humans that had been here, it was death.
The earth-colored dome before us was almost hidden beneath the riotous growth of the forest. Something moved on its surface. It was as if the dome itself was alive, with skin that rippled in the afternoon breeze. The jungle itself seemed to be one movable segment of life after another. To the Thorns, even the buildings were alive, it seemed.
“Sergeant Gunderson,” Randolph said quietly. “I have what I need. Let's get out of here.”
Gunny tapped me on the shoulder and pointed out our direction. I moved out to disable the sensors along the route. We had moved about a hundred meters when James pushed aside a huge elephant-ear leaf and stepped directly on a sensor I hadn't seen. The cloud of gas wrapped around him like an attacking snake, filling his lungs with acid and spores. James had time for one gargle then collapsed. I didn't need to check to know his lungs and airways would be filled with tight rootlets, growing at fantastic speed, choking him as they ate into his body.
Gunny grabbed his tags and set the time
r on the d-charge. “Let's move it.”
I gave up working on the sensors. The Thorns knew we were here now. I set a path to avoid the patches of blue, knowing the flowers could be discharged by remote control. Behind us the keening wail of a Thorn alarm sounded then the whine of a combat sled as scouts gave chase. Gunny must have had some built in time-lapse computer because the sled followed our path and stopped over James' body just as the charge let go. The blast of heat flipped the sled and ignited the fuel cell and ammo in one giant explosion. The jungle was silent for a moment before erupting in squeals and squalls as animals and insects prepared for battle. Now we had the whole jungle against us.
“Move it, Harris,” Gunny yelled and we fled through the jungle as fast as we could travel.
There was a danger moving this fast through Thorn jungle, but the need to get Randolph and his info back to Intelligence made the risk acceptable, according to HQ standards. Without a trail to follow, the sleds couldn't reach us through the canopy of the forest. Any sled trying to slip down through the trees would face the same danger from the local lifeforms as we did on the ground. Only there were a lot of things living up in the trees that were small and deadly, as opposed to the large and deadly things living on the ground. You take your pick, I suppose.
Gunny had us set off the electronic scramblers in our gear so the Thorns couldn't track us by the magnetic fields of our bodies, which differed markedly from their own. The hunters would now be limited to sight and ground traces, giving us a fair chance of reaching the backup LZ.
“Split by twos,” Gunny whispered over the comm. “Disguise your trail and direction. Make it look like there's a battalion of us in here. Then meet up at the LZ in three hours.”
According to my heads-up display, that didn’t give us much time to travel that far, but we had to make it if we were going to get out before Thorn reinforcements arrived. A site like the one we had just found normally had an eight-personnel unit. Two of them went up with the sled, leaving six. There would be two more teams coming after us with the last pair staying behind to guard the center.