Operation Sierra-75

by Thomas S. Gressman

  A fourth monster rose up in that one’s place and slashed at her belly with a weapon that looked like a combination buzz saw and entrenching tool. Frost twisted out of the way. The weapon caught some part of her combat harness, jerking her in a quarter circle before coming free. For one horrible second, she wondered if the attack had torn her suit.

  The creature stepped in toward her, swinging the strange melee weapon as it came. With its free hand it grabbed for the Jackal, trying to tear it from her grasp. Frost could either dodge the blow, or hang on to her shotgun. She released the stubby weapon and stepped back. Scrabbling for her sidearm, she found only an empty and torn nylon holster. That must have been what the creature’s weapon had snagged on.

  Vaguely, on the edges of her senses, she heard a high-pitched wail of horror and pain, but had no time to wonder if it was a friend or a foe.

  Frost yanked the heavy Ka-Bar combat knife from its upside-down sheath on her left shoulder and lunged at her attacker. The monster came up short. It dropped the Jackal and met her charge hand to hand. Frost grabbed the thing’s weapon hand with her left hand in what would have been a bone-crushing grip had the creature been human. She felt the cords of steely muscle beneath the being’s filthy hide. She attempted to stab it in the guts, but the creature writhed its belly out of the way of the knife and grabbed her knife wrist in a powerful hand the size of a shovel.

  The thing’s appearance was even more hideous at close range. Dust and dried mud seemed to be caked in its hair. Scars of every size and description covered its body. Where there were no scars, the thing seemed to have had metal bolt heads implanted in a sinuous pattern along its arms and legs. The creature snapped at Frost’s visored face with large, powerful, but rotted teeth. She was glad of the combat environment suit’s filter mask. She was certain the Masher had a reek more foul than a week-dead skunk.

  Chest to chest they struggled. Frost, with her years of training, against the creature’s brute strength and cunning. The thing lashed out with a foot, trying to smash Frost’s knee from beneath her. The gunnery sergeant anticipated the attack and avoided the blow. Twisting her upper body, she tried to lever the monster off its feet in a sort of hip toss. The creature was too heavy for her to do more than drag in a quarter circle.

  But that proved to be enough. The creature tumbled to the ground, its thick fingers still locked around her wrist. The thing’s weight dragged her down with it. Fearing an on-the-ground grapple with the powerful monster, Frost tore her hand free. She pulled back and, with both hands, plunged the Ka-Bar into the thing’s throat. She jerked the knife from the wound and drove it in again, and again, and again.

  Struggling to her feet, Frost looked about wildly, the gore-dripping combat knife held aggressively in front of her.

  “Gunny, you okay?” Ortega asked, stepping in close to her, carefully avoiding the purple-stained blade.

  “Ortega? What?”

  “It’s okay, Gunny. We’re clear. The bad guys are either dead or bugged out.”

  Frost stared at him, fighting to get her breathing and her killing rage under control.

  “Casualties?” she said at last.

  “Rice is dead. So is McBride,” Ortega replied. “Panchard is pretty badly ripped up. The docs are with him now. They don’t know if he’s gonna make it.”

  “What happened?”

  “The captain sent out the rest of Second Squad to bail us out,” Ortega explained. “They smoked at least five of the ugly fraggers, and the rest bugged out. The boss wants everyone back at the ship ASAP.”

  “Right,” Frost said with a sigh of exhaustion. Her hip ached where the creature’s weapon had smashed into her body. She was dreadfully thirsty.

  “Where’s my Jackal? And my Pug? Thank God I had that pistol. Otherwise, that thing’s ax, sword, or whatever the hell it is would have ripped my suit.”

  Ortega looked around and found both her weapons. The Jackal was intact, but the heavy M-43 automatic pistol had been badly damaged by the attack that had almost cost her both her leg and her life. She stuffed the weapon into a pouch on her combat harness. Ruined or not, she would not leave the Pug behind for the enemy.

  Frost turned her attention to the monster that had nearly taken her life. It was only about five feet tall, but its frame was layered with dense slabs of muscle. The thing’s head seemed too large for its body. The facial bones were coarse and large, as were all its features except the eyes. Those were small and beady, under massive, prognathous ridges. Its hair and skin were filthy and caked with the dusty loam that characterized the soil of the rift valley’s floor. Its mouth, full of snaggled, rotting teeth, was locked open in a surprised snarl.

  Something odd about the admittedly strange corpse caught Frost’s attention. Like those of the creatures in Dade’s recording of the attack on the scouts, this creature’s body was studded with small knobs and bosses of metal which seemed to be implanted in its flesh. In studying these implants, Frost saw yet another anomaly.

  Embedded in the thick muscle of the thing’s left shoulder was a drab green box with a metallic gray face. It was one of the infrared sensor packages from the converted probe. Wires trailing from the device seemed to run straight into the thing’s flesh, all clustered near the nerve plexus under the collarbone. The flesh surrounding the metal box appeared to be raw, and a dark reddish purple fluid oozed from it.

  “All right,” Frost muttered. “Let’s head back, like the boss said.”

  As the surviving members of her fire team and the Marines who had been sent out to rescue them filed past her on their way back to the wrecked survey ship, she looked down at the dead alien and sighed again.

  Fighting her sense of revulsion, Frost hoisted the creature onto her shoulders. Whatever happened, she was going to make sure that the brain-boys in the Technical and Intelligence Corps had at least one of the dead monsters to examine.

  Staggering under the unexpectedly heavy load, Frost headed back toward the ship.

  25

  * * *

  D r. Cortez leaned against the bulkhead outside the makeshift sick bay. The night had grown cool, and the clamminess in the air carried the cold straight through to her bones. Not five minutes ago, Captain Taggart had sent a runner asking for three of her medics to stand by in the cargo bay, should a patrol he had sent out run into trouble. Since then, the wrecked survey ship had taken on a menacing quality that seemed to come from her nightmares. Broken conduits and dangling wires resembled snakes and tentacles. The creak and pop of settling metal took on the menacing tone of a deranged killer’s footsteps as he slipped through the companionways and berthing spaces seeking his next victim. The odd green glow of the cold lightsticks only added to the otherworldliness of the scene.

  As she ducked under the ragged, pendulous tentacles of broken wires, her holstered sidearm jabbed into her short ribs. As a naval doctor, she was unused to carrying a pistol, usually finding herself aboard a hospital ship, where such a weapon would be of little use. Here, in the ghastly setting of a wrecked survey ship, cast away on an alien world, the Pug’s two-kilo bulk was a comforting presence on her hip.

  A sharp metallic clang echoed up the corridor, muted by distance. It seemed to her that the noise had come from the twisted bulkhead separating the ruin that had once been Cabot’s engine room from the rest of the ship. Cortez tried to melt into the shadows, pressing her back against the cold steel of the corridor wall. She breathed as shallowly and as slowly as she could, straining her ears to catch any sound drifting up from the engineering spaces. A faint scuffing sound reached her ears, followed by a sharp metallic clatter. A cold sweat prickled across her forehead and along the skin of her arms. She knew Taggart had not stationed any of his men inside the engine room.

  A patch of shadow of a darker shade than the surrounding murkiness seemed to flow from near the engine-room hatchway. A faint shuffling noise, like a leather bag being dragged along the deck, reached her ears. The half-seen specter stopped with a jerk.
The sibilant patter was replaced by a deep, questioning shuffle, like some huge dog casting around for a scent.

  Cortez’s nostrils were invaded by a sour odor, the stink of her own fear.

  The doctor’s combat environment suit had been equipped with the same low-light vision system as those worn by the Marines. As she huddled in that pool of shadow, she desperately searched her mind, trying to remember how to switch on the night viewing unit.

  Cortez heard a rapid, stuttering series of sharp, flat cracks coming from outside the ship. The reports sounded like a burst of loud firecrackers, but she knew it was automatic rifle fire. Then a deeper boom rang out. Footsteps sounded on the deck below. The shadow let out a guttural bark and lunged into the center of the corridor. A hollow thump, and the rattle of small metal objects spilled across the steel decking reached her ears. The sound of bare feet against the metal decking slapped off the hard walls of the companionway as the thing ran toward her.

  The doctor let out a sharp cry of surprise, and the thing skidded to a stop only a meter or two from her shadowed niche. For a long moment, neither moved. The black hulking thing stood frozen in the middle of the corridor, snuffling and wheezing. Cortez tried to shrink back even farther, almost willing her all-too-solid physical body to melt through the steel bulkhead and into the room beyond. Slowly, carefully, she slid her hand along her body, trying to reach the penlight tucked securely in the environment suit’s left breast pocket. It seemed almost as though her consciousness was detached from her body. She knew she was controlling the movement of her hands, but it was as though she was doing so from outside via some sort of remote control. Curiously, the fear which had been building up inside her was almost gone, banished to some small corner of her mind where it slavered and snarled like a chained, rabid dog, wanting to get loose and run ravening through the streets of her mind, but impotent against the thick steel bonds.

  The thing in front of her seemed to sense the movement. It let out a terrific yell and surged toward her. The penlight came free. At the same time her right hand, almost of its own accord, flew to the nylon holster strapped against the point of her right hip.

  The light clicked on, illuminating the dirt-streaked face, matted black hair, and crooked decaying teeth of a Masher. The thing’s tiny, piggish eyes screwed shut, and it brought its broad hands up to shield its face against the sudden glare of the penlight. A fresh wave of horror and revulsion rose in her gorge. In that fleeting moment, which seemed to stretch into hours, the image of a creature that should not be allowed to exist outside of nightmares was burned indelibly into her brain. It was almost as though she had come face-to-face with a chupacabra, the hideous goat-killing vampire of old Mexican legends. Incongruously, the doctor in her noticed an angry purple weal running across the alien’s face and down its right cheek. She took the disfigurement to be a half-healed scar. Cortez saw a large object drop from the creature’s hands and heard the flat metallic clatter as it bounced across the steel deck.

  The Masher recovered quickly. It barked out a short, staccato series of guttural sounds. Cortez got the distinct impression that the thing was cursing at her. A macelike weapon seemed to blossom from its right fist, which the creature drew back over its head.

  In desperation, still feeling no panic, the doctor yanked the Pug free of its flapped holster. She rammed the weapon’s muzzle into the alien’s belly and jerked the trigger. The normally reliable pistol failed to fire.

  The creature doubled up from the force of the blow. Its spiked club hammered into the bulkhead, gouging furrows in the steel only a handspan from the doctor’s head.

  Cortez dodged to her right. The partially winded thing tried to follow her. The sidestep had been a feint. Cortez arrested her movement and ducked away from the creature, putting a handful of meters between them before the monster realized she had outfoxed it. With a bellow, the thing turned on her again. It had not fully recovered from Cortez’s frantic blow to its midsection, and what would have normally been a swift rush turned into a shambling lunge.

  With remarkable clarity of mind and calmness of spirit, the doctor ran through the standard “failure drill” for the M-43 Pug autopistol. She slapped the bottom of the protruding magazine to ensure that it was properly seated, yanked the charging handle back, and released it, allowing the bolt to slam forward into battery once again. Extending the weapon in both hands, she squeezed the trigger.

  The big pistol went off with a flat whipcrack report. In the expanded consciousness that sometimes accompanies combat, Cortez noted a wave of reddish purple splattering from the creature’s forehead. She hauled the weapon back down and fired a second shot, then a third. The alien gave a gurgling sigh and collapsed to the deck. For several seconds it lay there twitching, as though its nerves were still sending messages to its muscles from a brain that was no longer functioning. Then it was still.

  Cortez let out a deep breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and slumped against the bulkhead. The Pug, which suddenly seemed to weigh a hundred kilos in her nearly nerveless fingers, dropped to her side.

  Footsteps thudded in the corridor. The doctor snapped erect, bringing her weapon back up into firing position. Two Marines, their rifles held at the ready, advanced down the companionway toward her. Behind them came George Grippo, holding his autopistol in a loose, nervous grip, as though he were afraid the weapon was about to turn and bite him.

  “Dr. Cortez, are you all right, ma’am?” one of the Marines, a young blond woman asked, laying a hand on Cortez’s wrists, gently forcing the medic to lower her pistol.

  “Yes, I’m all right, Private.” Her voice was so even it surprised her.

  “We heard the shots, and the captain sent us to check it out,” the female Marine continued. “What happened? Did you see any more of these things?”

  Before Cortez could answer, the second trooper straightened from his crouch next to the alien body.

  “It’s dead.”

  Cortez caught sight of a big, pistol-shaped weapon dangling from the Marine’s right hand. A long steel spike jutted from the gun’s muzzle. A black insulated cable about as thick as two of Cortez’s fingers ran from the weapon’s grip to the dead alien’s torso. There, the heavy wire seemed to meld with the creature’s right side, just under its short ribs. In a strange, detached way, she noticed that this alien was somewhat taller than the one that had attacked the Marine scouts.

  “Doc?” his partner prompted.

  “I don’t know, really.” Cortez tore her eyes away from the corpse she had just created. “I was just standing out here in the corridor when I saw something move back by the engine room.”

  As the doctor began to relate her experiences to the Marines, the female Marine reached out and gently took the big autopistol from Cortez’s hand. She removed the box magazine and pulled the charging handle, ejecting the live round from the chamber. The M-43 was considered a supremely reliable weapon. If one malfunctioned in the field there was usually some serious problem in the pistol’s mechanism.

  The trooper worked the pistol’s action several times, testing its operation.

  “How many shots did you fire, Doc?”

  Cortez thought a moment. “Three, I think.”

  The Marine looked around the deck and finally located a trio of spent shell casings. With a low chuckle, she thumbed the loose round back into the magazine before slipping the steel box into the well just ahead of the Pug’s trigger guard. Again, she racked the charging handle, feeding a live cartridge into the pistol’s firing chamber. Safing the weapon, she passed it back to Cortez.

  “That’s why you had a misfire, Doc. There was no round in the chamber. I suggest you keep it cocked-and-locked until we get off this mud-ball.”

  “What?” Cortez said, feeling a subtle tremor seize her right hand.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it too much, Lieutenant,” the blond Marine said with a reassuring smile. “It happens. The trick is to learn from the mistake.”

&nb
sp; Rapidly, the uncontrollable shaking ran up Cortez’s arm and spread to her whole body. Grippo dropped his pistol and darted forward to catch his chief before she fell to the deck.

  “Is she all right? What is it?” the Marine asked anxiously.

  “Adrenaline reaction,” Cortez answered through chattering teeth.

  “It happens sometimes,” Grippo said. “Sometimes you get so charged up by adrenaline that you get the shakes when things are all over. It’s a natural reaction. Now, why don’t you two heroes check this place out and make sure there aren’t any more of those damn things lurking around in here?”

  26

  * * *

  “S ay what?” Gunny Frost snapped as Dr. Cortez concluded the account of her encounter with the alien on Cabot’s upper deck. The doctor had met the Marine platoon leaders at the entrance to the cargo bay, just as Frost and her companions were returning from their disastrous foray to check on the disabled sensor packages. “How the hell did that happen?”

  Fuming, she turned on her heel and stalked out of the cargo bay, stepping over the body of the dead Masher she had carried back to the ship.

  Captain Taggart watched her go, feeling a pang of sympathy for those Marines who had been on sentry duty when the attack occurred. Gunnery Sergeant Onawa Frost in full hue and cry was an awesome sight, fit to unnerve even the toughest combat veteran.

  With a short, choppy gesture, Taggart summoned Corporal Henry.

  “Tim, we may have a security breach.”

  “Yeah, I heard,” the tall gray-haired corporal replied. “Somebody let a Masher sneak aboard the ship.”

  “I don’t know if it sneaked aboard or if it remained aboard, and we just never found it,” Taggart said with a tightness in his voice that spoke of self-reproach. He and Gunny Frost had made an inspection tour of the ruined ship themselves, and hadn’t spotted the hidden alien. “How it got aboard doesn’t matter. What does matter is finding out if any of those damn things are still aboard. Corporal, I want you to organize a search party. Go over every square centimeter of this ship. Check every compartment, every companionway, and every ventilation duct. If you see one of those things, grease it.”