>Suit impact! Right leg 95% . . .
>Suit impact! Breastplate 95% . . .
Some of the flying creatures broke their bodies on impact immediately, but the force of their fury was enough to dent the mechanized plate nonetheless. Dane batted his arms and tried to sweep the things off him, but soon he had alarm vectors ringing all over his suit.
“Gah! Get off!” Hopskirk was snarling, as a shot of orange pulse laser shot out from his rifle, skewering at least three and tearing their bodies apart, but doing little against the twenty more that flocked him.
Dane used his metal gauntlets to seize the creatures and fling them from his body, only for them to be replaced by several more.
Wham! Wham, wham, wham! More of the tiny bodies hit Dane, and he felt himself toppling over. Numerous alarms rang inside of his suit as his armor plate slowly lost its integrity, degree by degree . . . He was completely smothered by the things and saw their tiny biting faces cover his faceplate, scratching and clawing at the hardened crystal glass uselessly.
>Warning! Air filter clogged! Reverting to back up oxygen . . .
Dane bucked, the thought of not being able to breathe igniting in him an animal panic, even though he knew that each suit could function without an external air supply for a long time, designed as they were for the rigors of space . . .
It was still terrifying though, as the weight of hundreds of tiny bodies started to weigh him down, feeling heavier and heavier. They mounded over the Marines like great, living blankets . . .
Pha-BOOOM! Dane felt the ground shake, and the shock wave roll through him before he even had a chance to register what it was. For a moment, the alien creatures were shocked, rising from their places, and Dane turned to see the half-rising form of Bruce Cheng. He had used one of the flash-bang grenades to scare them!
Dane quickly pushed himself into a crouch in the moment of freedom, looking up . . .
The skies overhead were starting to turn gray in the pre-dawn, but the gray was blotted out by a swirling hurricane of flitting black bodies.
Oh crap! Dane realized that he must be looking at a lot—a lot—more of those things.
And the hurricane was spiraling down to slam towards them.
“The buildings!” Dane roared, snatching one of his own flash-bangs and slamming it into the ground next to him as he threw himself forward.
BOOOM! The glare glitched his visuals for a moment, but he kept on moving, pouncing up to his feet and bounding forward. BOOOM—Hopskirk must have thrown his own flash-bang too.
They were still a hundred feet or so from the nearest of the buildings. It was a low single-story metal box that appeared to have only one bulkhead door and a number of porthole-style windows dotted around its outside. Dane threw another of the flash-bangs to the side of them as they ran—he only had one left—but that didn’t stop the first of the bat-things from slamming into his suit.
Wham! Wham, wham, wham!
>Suit impact! Backplate 85% . . .
And then there was a thunder of small bodies against him, threatening to throw him to the ground again—
BOOOM! Bruce threw his second grenade into the air. Dane saw the brilliant flash of it eclipse the camp and scatter the winged terrors as he hit the door to the bunker and scrabbled at the door controls.
“Corsoni! I need this unlocked!” Dane said, as more of the things attached themselves to his suit.
BOOOM! “I’m out!” Hopskirk copied Bruce’s example and reached the side of the building.
“Here.” Dane tossed him the (unprimed) flash-bang grenade as Bruce threw his last.
Wham! Wham! Wham! More of the bodies were hitting them and the side of the building like hail.
“Sergeant, this is Corsoni! Transmitting access codes from the mission report straight to you,” the pilot shouted, and there was a blip as Dane’s internal suit server received, and he activated them.
BOOOM! “We’re all out!” Hopskirk shouted as the doors hissed open. They all threw themselves into the room on the other side, for the doors to hiss shut once again.
“Screee! Screeeee!” There was a terrible chittering noise over Dane’s suit speakers, along with the drubbing of hundreds of small bodies hitting the door on the other side. Dane realized that several of the terrible little things had made their way in with them, and were even now lurching and flinging their tiny bodies at them.
“Ach! Get off!” One slapped Hopskirk right in the faceplate, and the Orbital Marine ripped it from him with ease, before stamping on another of the fluttering bodies. The rest of the few that had made it past the threshold were similarly dealt with, and after a moment of activity, Dane and the others were left panting for air in the dark.
“Suit lights,” Dane breathed. He saw that they were in a lobby room with large equipment lockers that appeared mostly open to reveal selections of jump suits and fatigues, and another airlock door leading deeper into the building. Dane couldn’t see any bodies, which was probably a good thing.
“Persistent little things, ain’t they?” Hopskirk growled, nodding to the constant thump and slam against the bulkhead door. And the walls. And the porthole windows.
“Corsoni!” Dane suddenly realized.
“It’s okay, people—the little things don’t seem bothered by the Gladius at all. I’m thinking that they only register movement and attack . . .” Corsoni said with a laugh, “lucky for me! Although I can see on the radar that they are taking a pretty unhealthy interest in your building right now. I reckon your windows will hold, but you might be wise to move deeper in, just in case . . .”
“Affirmative,” Cheng said, casting a surly look at the windows that were blackened with their bodies, before shrugging and turning to the open airlock door that led deeper into the station.
Multiple airlock doors, Dane thought, just in case there was any airborne infection? “Roger, Corsoni. You keep an eye on the situation and stay safe.”
“I wasn’t planning on going sunbathing, champ,” Corsoni laughed again before clicking off.
“Okay.” Hopskirk shook his suit. The multiple plates resettled with a clatter like a bird ruffling its feathers. “I’m guessing that we’ve already figured out just what went wrong here and have solved the mystery of the missing expedition. Professor Honshou ordered everyone to get some outdoor time and wham!” He slapped his metal gauntlets together.
Dane was more than tempted to agree, when Bruce coughed by the airlock door, which had slid open as it recognized his Marine Corps ID.
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Hopskirk,” he said and pointed to the corridor beyond and the body that was illuminated by his suit lights.
5
The Camp
“They did look as though they had mighty powerful little teeth,” Hopskirk opined as the three orbital AMPs stood around the downed body of the human, still wearing the olive fatigues of one of the expedition team.
“That may be, but I’m not sure they were that sharp.” Bruce pointed to the fact that the man’s head had been separated from his body and currently lay a few feet away, staring up at the ceiling.
“No.” Dane considered and then pointed at something else. “And just what in the merry frack is that!?”
The man had his fatigues in disarray, and they could see from his rolled-up sleeves that there were strange discolorations forming a mosaic patina on the skin of his arms. Dane knelt down a little closer, to see lichen-like patterns had formed rounded areas that overlapped and spread all down his arms. His bare hands had born most of the brunt of the patina.
So there is an infection, Dane suddenly thought. And what was worse, there appeared to be long gouges criss-crossing his flesh, like scratches.
“Wait, did he—did he do this . . . to himself!?” Dane whispered in horror.
“What, he had a bad case of the heebies, and so he cut his own head off?” Bruce grunted with a soldier’s appreciation of the macabre. “I guess that is one hell of a solution.”
“Scann
ers,” Dane said, and the code running across his HUD started to scroll and run.
>Biological scan . . . Analyzing . . .
>>ERROR! Unidentified genome!
“Well, that is messed up,” Hopskirk said when his own suit completed the scan with the same result.
“It’s as if the suit can’t read him anymore, that infection . . .” Dane said as his teeth gritted together, “that infection has stopped him from being human. It’s done something to his DNA.”
Hopskirk leaned down, carefully picking up a small badge laying near the body. “He’s got a physical ID assigned by the colony. Says he’s Private First Class Abrams. A Marine.”
The three Marines, inside their metal shells, all shuddered at the thought that something could do this to someone like them.
Just what is going on down here!? Dane felt sick as he shook his head. “All right. We’re not touching him, but when we’re done here, we’ll get the ship’s drones to seal him up and pack him in the Gladius.”
“Er . . . is that wise?” Hopskirk said. “Y’know, if he’s infected or something?”
Dane silenced him with just a half turn of his head. “First in, last out,” Dane growled. “No one left behind.”
And at that, Dane stepped over the body and continued down the corridor, his rifle up and ready to fire.
The darkened corridor was punctured by the bright suit-lights as Dane and the others stalked.
“Clear,” he heard Cheng murmur as they paused by one of the two open metal doors, this one on the right, the further on the left. On the upper-right of Dane’s HUD was a station schematic, picked out in green vector lines.
“I’m reading this area as the mess hall,” Dane whispered, the darkness breeding a solemness to their movements.
“Affirmative.” Cheng eased into the room. Although Dane couldn’t see over the bulk of the man’s suit, he could see the hazy visual from Cheng’s suit camera. Metal tables and chairs, store cupboards, and a station kitchen.
“There’s been trouble here,” Cheng said. This was obvious given the spilled furniture and enamel plates that were strewn across the floor, along with blobs of lumpy, viscous-looking material.
Dane heard Cheng hiss, as their immediate expectation was that the viscera was going to be just that—some left-over parts of station personnel.
“Ah. It’s only gunk,” Cheng said, referring to one of the ubiquitous and ever-hated Marine ration staples, a blended spamlike material that lived up to its name.
“Looks like they didn’t even have time to clean up,” Hopskirk whispered from where he stood beside Dane.
“What, you think that guy back there was going to do it?” Cheng whispered, sweeping the room once more before returning to the corridor. He nodded as Hopskirk and Dane moved to repeat the process on the other open door, which stood as a dark portal as Dane approached.
“Medical,” Dane whispered, as Hopskirk slid to the wall side of the door, tensed.
“One, two, and . . . !” Dane stepped forwards, sweeping his rifle over the large, darkened space, and was momentarily dazzled by the bright glares of reflected light from a multitude of shiny, chrome surfaces. Medical units and laboratory counters. Glass cabinets and—
A blue light flickered into existence, as a human male form rushed towards him.
“Watch out!” Hopskirk warned, stepping around the open door and firing a pulse shot from his rifle through what would have been the man’s legs . . .
For the blast of orange laser fire to shoot straight through the man and hit one of the glass cabinets behind. The hologram evaporated before it even hit Dane.
“It’s a hologram. It’s a damn hologram!” Dane heaved a sigh. “Although you did a good job of killing one of the medical boxes, and . . . whatever that thing is inside of it.” Dane stepped into the room to see that the transparent medical units came in all sizes, from cooler-type boxes on top of tables all the way up to cabinets that stood from floor to ceiling.
And they all contained things.
Dane saw creatures that looked like insects, although they were the size of his hand, had far too many legs, and had forward pincers like a praying mantis. Other things appeared to be mammalian, or at least furred. There were creatures with long proboscis-like noses and frozen eyes, and of course, several examples of the bat-things, their wings splayed out and their maws frozen open with a forest of teeth. Even frozen as they were in their rictus positions, the flying things appeared murderous.
Dane started to turn to investigate the larger cabinets when suddenly, the blue light flared once again, and the form of the man materialized and ran for the door—
“Ach!” Hopskirk jumped in shock, but the hologram had already evaporated before it could pass the threshold.
“Who was that? That holo?” Cheng had appeared in the open doorway. “And why would someone make a repeating holo just of something like that?”
Dane nodded that he shared Cheng’s confusion. Holo technology was ubiquitous and could even, in a haphazard way, be interacted with using the right sensors and visualisation mappers—but usually the technology was reserved for digital displays of information or for recorded messages like the one from the Master Sergeant Lashmeier. Holos could also be used as entertainment, with a whole school of holo films and video games already established back on Earth . . .
Was that what this thing was? Dane waited for the form to reappear again. It did, with a pulse of blue, and ran forward just as before, caught in a seeming endless loop.
“It’s one of the expedition team, I think,” Dane said. He had made out the detail of the man’s fatigues, which looked pretty much the same as the ones that the dead guy outside was wearing.
“If there’s a holo, then there has to be power and a transmitter,” Hopskirk was saying. He turned in a slow circle as he looked at the ceiling above them, searching for the tell-tale black sensor units that projected the image of the repeated blue man running for the door, doomed never to make it. “And if there is a transmitter, then it’s probably got some kind of local memory storage with this program in it . . . Got it!” Hopskirk announced.
Dane, however, had turned back to the largest of the medical cabinets in the room. This cabinet stood even taller than he did in his orbital AMP suit.
“Holy frack!” He stepped back in shock upon seeing that it contained a humanoid figure.
Sort of.
The creature had two legs like a human, and it also had two arms—although these were much longer than any homo sapiens’s arms, reaching almost all the way to the thing’s knees and ending in large claws that looked as long as Dane’s head. Its flesh looked covered in a dense blanket of the same lichen-like encrustations that they had seen on the dead Marine outside, but here they had erupted into frills and brackets like a fungus.
But the strangest thing about the creature was its head—which was small and squat with features that were vaguely humanoid (although the mouth appeared a little too wide, on a jaw that was broader than a human’s) and a short mane of the same frilled fungus covered its scalp, neck, and shoulders.
Not to mention the thing had a pair of sweeping, demonic horns.
“Son of a . . . Who let in the pantomime devil!?” Hopskirk said when he saw what Dane had found.
“Is that one of the locals?” Cheng asked. “But that looks . . .”
“Intelligent?” Dane completed. “Looks like a human?” The Marine shuddered once again. Was he looking at some creature that was like a super-primate of this planet, like the gorillas back on Earth? Or was he looking at a thing that had society and culture, that had wishes and dreams? Had the expedition found another intelligent race . . .
One that might not have taken too kindly to having their world colonized, Dane thought as he looked at the large claws.
“Got the memory stick!” Hopskirk announced as the latest blue holo vanished when the Marine took out the controlling program. “If we can get to a control board or something—the
re must be one of those in here somewhere—then I can open it up and take a look at what the thing is hiding . . .”
“Okay, schematics say that there’s stairs at the end of this corridor leading down to the control bunker.” Dane nodded back to the door. His eyes lingered over the frozen, petrified bodies of the aliens that had been collected here, especially the largest troll-like one.
What were you doing here, Professor? Dane frowned before following the others out.
“Guys.” The urgency in Cheng’s voice pulled them to a halt as they descended the stairs to the lower level underneath the container, which looked to be hiding a reinforced steel bunker.
And there at the bottom of the stairs before the heavy steel airlock door was another body.
“Another soldier,” Cheng said, stepping around it warily.
It was indeed another man dressed in fatigues, but this one had all of his limbs and parts where he should. The man was lying faced down, sprawled as though his last act had been to reach for the steel airlock door—before he was gunned down.
“Those are pulse burns,” Cheng said, pointing at the blackened mess that was the poor Marine’s back. The Orbital Marine looked at his compatriots. “That means that there are people on the planet with guns.”
“There were Marines on this planet with guns . . .” Hopskirk muttered, not stating the obvious, but everyone was thinking about it anyway. Had the expedition turned against its own? Was there a rogue element in the expedition? Or had they just gone crazy up here on Planet 892, thousands and thousands of light years away from their home?
“Wait a minute.” Dane knelt by the side of the body and teased back the man’s sleeve with a metal finger. His suspicions had been right. The man’s flesh was covered with more of the patina of lichen, and this one had broken out from the man’s flesh, reminding Dane of the troll-creature upstairs in the medical laboratory.
Wait . . . a thought crossed Dane’s mind, along with a memory.
Metal Warrior: Precious Metal (Mech Fighter Book 5) Page 3