Then, with a thunderous rumble, the ground reared up and swallowed them.
She woke dazed and bruised in darkness.
Down was sideways and up was somewhere else. Her arm felt sore, trapped. With a determined effort she cracked it free. She waved the other arm, carved out some space in front of her, and neuralled on her shoulder-mounted torch. Shockfoam, white and crispy like meringue, had saved her life. She kicked her legs, amazed they were still willing and able, broke the foam. Suit vitals on the inner arm indicated that its integrity had held, but comms, meds, and data were all shot. A red light on the sleeve blinked every few seconds; air supplies were low but not critical. She must’ve been out for the better part of an hour. No sign of fear. Perhaps she was still in shock. Whatever, at least she could think straight.
She breathed calmly, excavated Nik from his foam crypt. His body was doubled up, hanging. She pressed her helmet against his, her busted comms meaning he wouldn’t hear a peep without direct contact. “Nik! Wake up!”
He groaned, slowly came round.
“Check your vitals.”
He gazed at his arm then gave her a groggy thumbs up.
The starsloop had corkscrewed in the crash. Getting out was no picnic. After swinging and grappling and climbing, they stood on the starsloop hull surveying the carnage. Thank Sol we hadn’t closed the hatch before we were hit, Lena thought. The starsloop was deader than Mercury now, even the emergency hydraulics were busted good. Nik pointed to the rough track where it had skidded to rest.
S-‘s that way, he mouthed.
“What?”
He loomed close, cracked their helmets together harder than he intended. “I said, the slicer’s that way.” His voice sounded hollow, distant.
The slicer? She’d get the story later. Right now they had to get inside, avoid asphyxiation. “Let’s head away from him.”
“Where’s the nest entrance?”
Good question. The vacsuits couldn’t help them, their data cores corrupt or broken. Lena scanned the dead horizon. Nothing. Nothing except the odd flutter of motion. Insects. And insects meant access—
The pheromone! “Do you have the aerosol?”
Nik cursed, then peered down into the dim interior of the starsloop. He clambered inside, moments later hoisting up a couple of compact harpoon guns and a couple pairs of Hi-Gain IR goggles. As Lena clutched the second gun her eyes wandered back in the direction of their arrival.
Something glinted in the sunlight, far off.
The slicer? She went horizontal, pressed herself against the starsloop shell, and motioned the danger to Nik. He hauled himself out, touched helmets. “If you can see him, he can see you. We go. Now.”
“Where’s the aerosol?”
“Lost.” He grabbed one of the guns, stuffed the goggles into a pouch on his vacsuit. “Come on.”
Lena picked up the other gun, clasped the barrel of the harpoon gun tight, glad to feel its heft. Then, crouching, they scampered down the curved belly of the starsloop and onto the asteroid. The stone was cold and hard. Dread assailed her. This was supposed to be a cakewalk—babysit a journo, collect some hard samples, go home.
She slapped her helmet as she ran. Stop it.
Nik was a few paces ahead, his steps controlled but fast, as if he was running on the spot. The microgravity was a nightmare, and she tried to emulate his action, all the while keeping her eyes peeled for outcroppings or loose rocks. And then they needed to find an insect—
The whole ground shook. She nearly tumbled.
Nik turned, pointed into the sky. She twisted, watched a piece of debris pirouette between the stars and crash mere meters away. Burnt and mangled as it was, she still recognized it as the remains of the landing ramp. Beyond it the starsloop was a blackened smoldering thing.
Nik gestured with his head. Come on.
She nodded, tried to ignore her hammering heart. She pointed at a dead insect ahead and to the right, not two hundred paces away. They moved fast, and not long after, wheezing hard, Lena pulled a hunting knife from her shin pocket. Hand shaking, she crouched down and began examining the underside of the insect’s head with the tip of the blade. A thin film coated its exoskeleton.
There.
The gland was easily visible beneath the insect’s leathery skin, a thick rope of a vessel. She beckoned Nik over, motioned for him to cup his hands. He did, and she sliced through the gland. Hot spurts of fluid pooled in his makeshift bowl, dripped between his fingers. He threw the liquid over himself and rubbed it into the folds of his vacsuit. Lena did likewise with the ebbing flow.
It felt like a pathetic shield against the insects.
She shook away the thought, found herself listening to the quickened beep of her sleeve. Oxygen supply was getting low.
Not waiting to speak, they hiked up a gentle rise. A vast expanse of the magenta needlegrass stretched across the shallow valley beyond. Foraging insects toiled in the field, coming and going from a fissure in the cliff on the far side. Hundreds of kilometers of nest tunnels, not to mention the team research station, lay within.
Lena nodded. Onwards.
An insect approached as they slid down loose rock. Lena tried not to hesitate, tried not to quicken her breathing, but she couldn’t help it. She wanted to run, but she held firm as the insect loomed close. Feelers roved over her, analyzed her chemical signature. A bulbous head, less than a foot away, rocked from side to side, while its sharp jaws flexed in slow pulses. She hadn’t felt so uncomfortable since she’d been subjected to Artem’s withering gaze after she’d flunked her Highers all those years back.
Eventually, satisfied, the insect moved on.
They headed for the fissure. At the thick spongy membrane—five paces wide and twice as tall—that sealed the entrance to the nest, Nik turned and shrugged. Open sesame? he mouthed.
Lena placed her hand, palm flat, against the membrane. The organic material was semi-translucent, but the multitude of layers made the whole thing opaque, like staring into deep water. She pulled her hand away, gelatinous tendrils caught between her fingers. As she studied the strands, marveling at the ingenuity of the system, motion within the membrane drew her eye.
Dark forms shifted, grew.
Lena bundled into Nik, moving both of them out of the way.
Two legs came first, then the antennae, then the head. Remarkably little of the material adhered to the insect as it passed. The membrane wobbled, then stilled.
“Amazing,” Lena whispered. As she said the word, splinters of rock exploded from the cliff, rained over them. She glanced back, watched the figure descending on the far slope. It fired off a few more pulses, killing any approaching insects in a cloud of gore and dust.
Nik untangled himself from Lena’s grasp. He took a few steps back, rocked on his heels, and sprinted forward, harpoon at his hip like an infantry charge. Lena neuralled her torch on, swept it up and down where he’d entered.
No evidence of his passage remained.
She took a few paces backwards and charged. The membrane was deeper than she’d imagined and she found herself trapped as if a fly in amber. Her breaths came in shallow gasps as she struggled. The vacsuit beeped faster than her heart. The pain in her chest worsened. Ahead, in the attenuated light of her torch, his outline fractured and morphed by the membrane, she thought she could see Nik moving freely.
His form got bigger, before his harpoon gun speared into the area to her right. She flexed her fingers, slowly moving her arm until she could clasp the end of the barrel. She tugged as best she could to indicate she had purchase, then gripped tighter.
Three heaves later, chest burning, arm feeling like it’d been wrenched from its socket, she was inside.
Save for the lances of light emanating from their shoulder-mounted torches, the interior of the nest was pitch black. Lena swept her beam down the passage, fighting a growing sense of claustrophobia. The pockmarked walls looked ancient and alien. Occasional motion blurred the edge of her vision.
Part of her wanted to take her chances with the slicer. What would Artem do?
She drew the light back to Nik, who blocked the beam with his hand. She dipped the light. He gestured with his hands. Remove the helmets?
She nodded. As Nik lifted off his helmet, Lena unclasped her own. A faint hiss accompanied the outrushing high-pressurized mix, before she caught her first breath of the nest. The air was warm and thick, rich with an unpleasant yeasty scent. Strange clicks and tapping noises could be heard from distant tunnels. Nik spluttered.
“It’s the fungi.” Back on Mars, Lena had helped geneer the carbon-dioxide fixer.
She’d been proud. “You’ll get used to it.”
She slipped on her goggles. The darkness transformed into a web of ochre filaments, the contours of the passage walls clear. Dead insects littered the tunnel. They ran. Despite the low gravity, lifeless carapaces and spindly limbs cracked under their feet. As they made their way deeper, their weight would only lessen from this point. Their passage would be a mixture of scrabbling on all-fours as much as hiking. “That thing outside,” Lena shouted, “you’ve seen it before?”
“Maybe not one and the same.” Ahead, beyond the splayed forms, the passage opened up into a bigger chamber. Bright flashes of cadmium orange and sodium yellow slashed across Lena’s vision. More insects. “But I’ve seen others like it—other slicers. It’s a remnant of the Fringe Wars.”
Fringe Wars. Lunatic factions fighting bitter wars for Europa, Titan, and the rest.
What the hell was it doing here?
Nik seemed to read her mind. “That war made a lot of crazies, a lot of killers,” he said, breathing hard. “Deadly, augmented crazies more machine than man. We called them slicers. Some of the more sane ones do a steady line as guns for hire.”
She recalled the name now. On Mars, children were told that slicers roamed the red plains outside the domes looking for easy kills. It helped keep kids away from the ‘locks. First she’d feared them. Later she’d thought them no more real than ghosts. Now she knew different. “You think the mining corps sent it?”
“Makes sense. They’ve got the funds—and the reasons.”
They stumbled into the cavernous chamber, came to a halt. The smell of butchery was almost overwhelming. The place thronged with insects. Some were clearing the fallen—hoisting severed limbs, cutting gasters into more manageable pieces, scampering off with their bloody pillage—while others raced from one side to the other. They paid little heed to the two newest members of their colony.
Nik gagged, his vomit a sickly yellow color in the infra-red. A small worker ate it up. “What happened here?” he asked, wiping the back of his hand over his mouth.
“Looks like the colony went to war with itself.”
“Why?”
“Starvation? Disease? I don’t know.” A heavy rumble from the passage they’d left broke Lena’s train of thought. The slicer.
“Which way?” Nik asked, beads of perspiration hot on his brow. A dozen passages led off in a myriad directions.
Lena glanced around the chamber, watched a couple of workers carry off their booty through a tunnel high and to the left. They’d be taking the bodies to the garbage pits, close to the fungal gardens—and the source of food for the team. The research station would be nearby. “Up there,” she said, pointing.
She didn’t wait for a reply.
“Now I feel safe,” Nik said, sneering.
They’d torn through the dark riddle of tunnels, descending and climbing when they’d had to, sweating hard, not speaking much. They’d pretended that was to conserve their energy, but the reality was something else: they didn’t want to be heard.
The maze-like place was their best ally and worst enemy. The tunnels forked and multiplied so much that there was no chance the slicer could’ve followed them, but equally, the sense of being lost, of being at the whim of the deranged geometry of the nest, was a nasty, itchy feeling that only got worse with each step.
They’d made it to the research station, though. Lena blinked, dazzled, as she ran into its artificial white light. The yeasty smell was still strong, but here it battled with more familiar aromas: coffee, disinfectant, plastics. Somebody or something had trashed the room, the wall of computing cores smashed, glass crunching underfoot. Lena sifted through the electronic rubble left on the large table that dominated the middle of the room, but anything that wasn’t in pieces had been wiped.
“Nothing,” she said. No clue as to Artem’s or the others’ whereabouts. No clue as to how they might escape.
“What now?” Nik’s suit, like hers, was in tatters, ripped and useless. He fumbled a packet of flashfeed, scattering the freeze-dried contents over the floor. “Dammit!”
She needed his smarts, not his anxieties. “Why’d you think it came now? Why not two years ago?”
“What?” Nik crouched, ferrying morsels of food into his mouth with his fingers.
“Genotech’s been here two years. Why did the corps wait two years before they sent this thing?”
Nik looked up, stopped chewing. “Maybe they never thought this crazy idea would come to anything.” He got up, ferreted about. If he got out of this, he’d have one hell of a story to tell. “Or maybe sending the slicer was a last resort after the usual channels failed.” He proceeded into an adjoining room—the researchers’ dorm by the look of things—and his voice grew quieter. “You know, the bribes, the—”
There was a loud crash from the other room.
“Nik?” She felt her stomach pit.
“Don’t come in.”
What had he seen? She had to know. If it was Artem—
Nik came out of the dorm, stood in the threshold. He raised his hands in a stopping motion, using his frame to block her view. “They’re dead,” he said. He grabbed her wrists. “And messed up.”
His words only made her more frantic, and she tried to writhe past him. The room smelt rancid. “Let go of me, for dust’s sake!”
He didn’t.
Lena stopped struggling. “I need to know if it’s him.” She held his gaze, and finally he relented, flinging her arms down before letting her past. She should’ve taken a moment to compose herself, but her eyes were drawn to the spectacle like vultures to a carcass.
No surface or fixture had escaped the blood. Misty, ferrous-colored arcs daubed the walls. Congealed slicks caked the bunks. Thick plum-shaded puddles pooled around the bodies. The scene had a surreal, artistic quality—at least until Lena caught a glimpse of a man’s face. Despite some decomposition, she recognized him.
It was Carlson, the myrmecology expert.
They were only acquaintances, but she remembered a snatch of conversation they’d shared in the Genotech cafeteria. She retched, tasted bile. She took a deep breath, then moved closer to one of the other bodies that slumped upside-down off a lower bunk. Please don’t let it be Artem, she thought, hating herself for it. She twisted her head—
Petronis. Climatology.
Last one. The body was splayed on the floor, face down. She pivoted, careful not to step in the surrounding viscous fluid, and crouched. She steeled herself, then rolled the body. She gasped. The face was bruised and bloody. She tugged free the corpse’s arm, spat on the sleeve and scrubbed away the gore.
It was Miera. The team petrologist. Lena and the man used to play shuttle ball together. She stumbled backwards, fighting another wave of nausea.
She turned round, fell into Nik’s arms, numb. She squeezed her eyes shut as if she could undo all of this in that simple act. They stood holding one another for a long while, gently swaying. When she opened her eyes, she cried out in shock.
Somebody was standing in the doorway.
It was her brother, Artem.
He placed a finger over his lips, then led them in silence through the wrecked research station and out into the musty passage. They hadn’t gone five paces when he pointed to an area high on the tunnel side. He clambered up and disappeared into the wall. Next mom
ent an arm shot out with an open hand. Lena went first, Nik second, and shortly the trio sat in a tiny cubby hole, legs tangled.
Lena pressed the palm of her hand against her brother’s face, grateful to feel his warmth, but he swatted it away, angry. She was going to say something, but his glare made her hold her tongue. He nodded at the small hole through which they’d scrambled. Over their breaths, Lena could hear the sounds of the nest—unsettling clicks and burrs—and something else . . . a whirring sound . . . regular . . . artificial. It grew louder, and she realized what it was: mechanized servos.
The slicer.
It grew louder still, and Artem indicated for them to hunker down as best they could. Lena’s heart was beating so hard, she was sure the slicer must’ve been able to hear it.
The noise of the servos stopped.
She pictured it mere paces away, gaze combing the walls. After a long moment it moved off. She could still hear it, though. It must’ve gone into the research station. Her body ached, and she felt a pain where a sharp tuft of rock dug into her side. Her legs went numb. Eventually the slicer came out of the station, strode past them, rock quaking at its every step. When all they’d been able to hear was the sounds of the nest for several minutes, Artem spoke in a low whisper. “You shouldn’t have come here.”
“We had no choice!” Lena snapped back, immediately regretting her tone.
Nik nodded. “That thing shot us out of the sky.”
Artem dropped his head between his knees.
Lena gripped his hand. “The corps sent it, didn’t they?”
“Only after I told them where to shove their money.” He pulled his head up, met her eyes. “I was stupid, Lena. I thought I could handle them alone.”
They sat in silence for a while. “Why are the insects fighting?” Nik asked.
Artem narrowed his eyes, glanced between the pair of them, calculating. “My guess is that that thing brought some kind of phage that sent them into a frenzy.”
He pulled a holostick from his coveralls. A complex web of light filled the space between them. “This is a map of the nest.” He delved a hand into the holo, and a green path appeared. “And this is your route to safety. The phage hasn’t spread to this area yet. There are emergency space-rafts here.”
The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera Page 27