Onslaught

by Scott Bartlett

  The pilot complied.

  After today, everyone would know the name of Gabriel Roach. That would make a good start for his new life.

  The air outside the airlock tasted a bit like mildew, but other than that he felt fine. What’s a little mildew between exiles? If the odor became overbearing, they could easily clear these trees, assuming they were the source of the smell.

  Movement behind one of the strange plants caught his eye, and Gabe raised his assault rifle.

  A creature that resembled a giant beetle trundled into view, navigating the bumpy ground with a steady, metallic whine.

  The scientist’s voice squawked from his transponder. “Roach. What did you find?”

  “I…I think it’s a robot.”

  “A robot? That isn’t good. It means the planet is inhabited.”

  “We didn’t see any structures coming in.”

  “Yeah. Maybe they’re subterranean.”

  Gabe hefted his rifle. “I’m gonna shoot it.”

  “Do not shoot it. That could alert its owners to our presence. If they don’t already know.”

  He lowered his gun, but only for a moment. Then he aimed it again and fired a burst.

  The Ocharium-enhanced rounds flipped the thing back against a tree, and it fell to the ground, where it struggled to right itself. Gabe fired again.

  Several bursts later, he’d succeeded in putting a big enough hole in the thing that its innards began spilling out onto the ground. But as quickly as the hole in the robot had opened, it closed again, and it trundled onward, in the direction it had been going.

  Gabe walked over to inspect the shiny, gray fragments that had spilled from the machine’s guts. The pieces looked metallic, with lots of little ridges sticking up from them.

  “That’s scandium,” the scientist said into his ear, sounding a little breathless. “A rare earth element.” For its part, the machine he’d shot was dragging itself across the ground, away from Gabe.

  “I’m guessing our new society could use that,” Gabe said, raising his gun once more to shoot the robot. “Meaning we should break open as many of these little critters as we find.”

  “They must be resource-gathering robots. It would be better if we could discover where it’s headed with the rest of the scandium. We can follow it, once we’ve safely deployed a full battalion to—”

  “I’m on it.” Gabe strolled away from the shuttle, following the robot, confident in his com’s ability to prevent him from getting lost.

  “Roach, you should wait till I’ve properly cleared the others to leave the shuttle!”

  “Nah.”

  “Be careful. We don’t know what sort of defense systems those robots have.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  The more risks he took today, the better the story would be of the first man to step onto a planet in a new galaxy. And the better that story was, the farther it would spread through the company, and the longer it would be remembered. The longer his name would be remembered.

  Everyone would remember Gabriel Roach, just as he was sure anyone he’d ever met had never forgotten him.

  Chapter 3

  First Contact

  “Hey. Wait up.”

  Gabe turned to find Peter Price closing in from behind, pistol held at the ready.

  Damn it.

  “Leave off, Price. I’ll be fine on my own.”

  “I was ordered to accompany you. The others will follow the moment they’re ready. We should probably wait for them.”

  “Wonderful,” Gabe spat. “Well, we’re going to be the ones to make the history books. You and me, Price. You weren’t ordered to wait for the others, I’m guessing. The higher-ups only told you to follow me, right? They know I’m not going to stop either way, and they wanted to make sure I had a buddy. That about right?”

  “Uh…yeah,” Price admitted. “That is what I was told.”

  “Let’s go, then. I lost the critter I was following inside a thicket of brambles, but I bet we’ll find another one soon enough. Maybe we can claim one for ourselves. Get rich.”

  Price didn’t comment on that idea, choosing instead to stumble over a root and nearly fall on his face.

  “Did you hear they’re giving us ranks, now?” Price said, probably hoping it would distract Gabe from his clumsiness.

  “There’s nothing you can tell me I don’t already know, Price. I wouldn’t bother trying.”

  “Wonder what rank they’ll give me,” the man went on, as though Gabe hadn’t spoken.

  Frowning, Gabe ignored the question as he pressed through the woods, nose wrinkling at the persistent mildew smell.

  Hope that lets up sometime soon.

  Before long, he spotted another one of those resource-gatherer things, emerging from between two trees to cross the clearing right in front of him.

  “There,” Gabe said, stopping. Price drew up alongside him. “I knew there’d be more of those things. We’re way ahead of those stupid scientists.”

  Again, Price didn’t engage with his comment. “You think you’ll miss the Milky Way?” he said instead.

  “I feel like we’re having two different conversations,” Gabe answered. It was how he normally felt whenever he was unfortunate enough to find himself in conversation with Price, and he’d remarked on the phenomenon before, but it bore repeating.

  The easy answer would have been “scientists aren’t usually considered stupid, Roach.” But Price is too slow to pluck even that low-hanging fruit.

  The robot had made it to the other side of the clearing, now, and Gabe crept forward, wary of startling the thing from its path.

  He needn’t have worried, it seemed. The thing didn’t appear to register his presence at all—it was pretty single-minded about getting to wherever it was headed.

  I can respect that.

  Gabe dropped his effort to be stealthy and strolled through the woods after the thing.

  He and Price followed the critter through a patch of thick trees, across a shallow brook, and over a hill.

  By then, most of the Darkstream soldiers that had come down in the shuttle with them had caught up, a few of them remarking on Gabe’s taking off into the woods in tones that ranged from lighthearted to annoyed.

  Gabe didn’t care how they felt about it. He just hoped being the first to step foot on whatever they ended up calling this planet would be enough to net him some notoriety.

  More notoriety would mean more respect, more demand for his services, and probably a higher pay grade, eventually.

  As for the others, if they had a problem with his actions, they could feel free to try taking him up on it. He’d be happy to hand them their asses.

  Either way, he didn’t expect any consequences from higher up. The company tended to grant Gabe a lot of leniency, which was partly why he’d taken this job in the first place.

  Darkstream respected talent—they respected someone who got the job done. The company was much more about the why than the how, and that fit with the way Gabe had been raised.

  His mother, Tabitha Roach, had been a prominent businesswoman, who’d made software that automated the marketing for other entrepreneurs looking to exploit the opportunities that waited on the micronet. Whatever their product, her tools had told them the exact keywords they needed to target, along with the exact audience they’d needed to tailor their wares to, and how to do it.

  “Focus on the why, not the how,” Tabitha had always taught Gabe. “Folks that focus on the how limit themselves, and they’ll be beat out every time by those obsessed with the why.”

  For Tabitha, it hadn’t ever mattered how much private customer data she’d had to vacuum up and share with her clients in order to make her methods work. What mattered was that she’d helped superior products find a home. If a client ever approached Tabitha with an inferior product, she sent them straight back to the drawing board, which ended up serving her, the client, and the customer.

  Mostly, it had served the custo
mer.

  Gabe had lapped up her teachings, and now he lived and breathed them. Having found an employer that shared the philosophy, he couldn’t be happier. The UHF had focused way too much on the how, which had neutered their effectiveness.

  But in his new position, Gabe was an unstoppable force of unbridled why.

  The forest gave way without warning, to a vast meadow. A host of giant aliens swarmed around the meadow’s center.

  Raising his assault rifle, Gabe started toward them.

  “Hold up, Roach,” a stern voice said from behind him.

  He stopped. That was Tessa Notaras, one of the few people he actually listened to. She brooked no nonsense, not ever, and he knew she had ways of making his life hell if he tried going against her.

  Besides, he respected Notaras. She was also why-oriented.

  “We’re doing this right,” Tessa said. “Those things are huge, and we have no idea how they’ll react to our presence. We also don’t know what they’re doing, exactly, but—” She broke off to point in various directions around the meadow. “See the way the grass is rippling? I bet those are more of the robots. They all seem to be converging on those beasts. Where the aliens are gathered, that’s probably where the robots deposit the resources, so it’s definitely of interest to us. Let’s investigate. Everyone move forward in skirmisher formation.”

  The platoon—the part of it that had caught up, at least—raised their guns and fell into the staggered formation Tessa had called for, designed to focus power to the front.

  As they drew near, Gabe was able to make out the aliens’ appearance more and more.

  They were larger than the biggest horses he’d ever seen, though the resemblance to horses ended there. These creatures were royal purple in color, for one, and their bodies came closer to a bear with unusually long legs than a horse, while their heads resembled that of a panther, as did their long, powerful-looking tails.

  The beasts began to notice them, and as they did, they began to adopt a formation of their own, which amounted to little more than a single rank.

  Not bad, if you’re looking to trample your targets. Which these things were clearly capable of doing.

  Gabe had drawn close enough now to see the spectacular range of eye colors these things had: orange, purple, pink, and even black.

  “Steady,” Notaras said over a platoon-wide channel. “Be ready to fire on my mark.”

  But the aliens didn’t charge. Instead, after taking a couple steps forward—an act that sent a ripple of tension all through the Darkstream soldiers’ formation—they each lowered their heads right to the ground, breaking eye contact with the soldiers while flattening their ears against their heads.

  “What is this?” Gabe said. “Are they about to attack?”

  “I don’t think so,” Notaras said. “I think…I think they’re submitting to us.”

  Chapter 4

  Disaster into Opportunity

  “This is quite a find,” Bob Bronson muttered to himself as he descended the wide, steel staircase that led to the underground facility ringing the enormous deposit site.

  Mario Laudano only just heard Bronson’s mutter over their echoing footfalls. This site had already become a beehive of activity, but Laudano wasn’t exactly sure what he was supposed to be doing.

  “The greater the find, the greater the likelihood it has someone strong to protect it,” Laudano answered, though he wasn’t sure Bronson had meant his words as a conversation starter.

  “Those two aren’t always directly proportional,” Bronson said.

  By now, scientsts crawled all over the place, investigating everything from the robots that brought the resources to the vast repository where they dropped them.

  Given that no manual laborers were authorized to come down to the planet yet, the soldiers themselves were responsible for any work that had to be done. Some of them, anyway, and they were none too happy about it. Those with more seniority remained up top, guarding against incursions from whatever threats this world ended up having to offer.

  “Any sign of those beasts returning?” Laudano said, breaking the silence that had followed them underground. They’d almost reached the stairs’ bottom.

  “Nope. They performed that supplication ritual, or whatever the geeks are calling it, and then they spooked. We have a name for them, now, by the way. The Quatro.”

  Everyone’s so quick to name things. Laudano expected this world would provide an opportunity for a naming bonanza, so they could have at it, for all he cared.

  “Do you trust their supposed geniality?” Laudano said.

  “The rank-and-file soldiers seem to. I don’t. Actually, the fact that our fighters trust it makes me trust it even less. They have us placated, now, and they could use that to strike at any time.”

  “Yeah.” Laudano couldn’t help but notice Bronson’s use of the term ‘rank-and-file.’ That was fine for Bronson to say, since he’d been put in charge of this whole operation.

  But Laudano…sometimes, Laudano wondered whether ‘rank-and-file’ was all he was. In truth, he had no idea what his position in the company was supposed to be. He’d been assured by multiple executives that he would have a wonderful home with Darkstream, a well-paid home, but that had been before the company had fled the Milky Way.

  Where do I fit in, now? Apparently, they were getting ranks soon. If Laudano didn’t get a high one…

  What? What am I going to do? It wasn’t as though there existed another company in this system to apply for. This was it. This was life, now.

  “Even if the aliens do intend to remain friendly, and are likely to stick to those intentions long-term,” Bronson continued, “their presence still poses a problem. The company has identified this region as ideal for colonization. The other regions will be fine to expand into, over the coming decades—fine—but this one’s ideal. And if we resolve ourselves to sharing it with these Quatro, at some point we’re going to hit a wall in terms of the resources we can extract. Whether they own the robots or not, they’re obviously using some of the resources. Incidentally, I don’t think they do own the robots. They seem too primitive to have created them. But that doesn’t matter.”

  Laudano wondered whether he was hearing Bronson’s own thoughts, or whether the man was regurgitating thoughts passed down to him from the board of directors.

  They’d finally reached the entrance to the underground facility, where each resource deposited by those robots was sorted and stored in its own container. Every container had an unprotected dispenser accessed via the facility, where anyone at all could collect the resources for transport back up the stairs. No security clearance needed. No code to enter. No auto-turret to contend with.

  The company geeks said that, in the future, they could prevent the robots from depositing their resources into the automatic sorter at all, and then they could do their own sorting, right on the surface, where the resources wouldn’t have to be carried back up the long staircase.

  Bronson went on: “We have an incredible opportunity, here, Laudano. If we can capitalize on what these robots collect, we can expand faster than we’d ever imagined possible. We can turn our exile from the Milky Way, which everyone’s viewing as a disaster, into an opportunity. That means skyrocketing up the corporate ladder—for both of us. If we do this right, that is.”

  “How do we do it right?”

  Bronson opened the door, holding it ajar for Laudano. “Step inside, away from ears too curious for their own good. Then I’ll tell you.”

  Laudano joined Bronson inside the dimness of the facility. And he listened.

  He liked what he heard.

  Twenty minutes later, he was alone, speeding across the landscape in one of the hoverbikes the company had sent down a few hours after the first shuttle touched down. He’d secured his assault rifle to the front, just above the throttle.

  Avoiding thick woods, he stuck to sparse copses and open meadows. He’d turned up the bike’s hover function, whi
ch would burn through its energy stores quicker but which also kept him mostly clear of the sea of tall, brittle grass. That grass was just as good at inflaming his sinuses as any grass he’d ever encountered.

  It didn’t take him long to track down one of the aliens from before. The thing walked across a spacious meadow by itself.

  So maybe they don’t travel in packs after all. Either that, or this one’s a lone wolf, so to speak.

  That made Laudano’s mouth quirk into a half-grin. Then, he raised his gun before the alien had even registered the advent of the hoverbike. He put a round straight into the thing’s haunches.

  The beast barked in pain, then swung around to stare at Laudano, flanks heaving.

  Laudano had brought the hoverbike to a stop around forty meters away, and now he waited for the alien to react.

  It didn’t. It just stared at him, still breathing heavily with the pain Laudano had inflicted.

  “I shot you,” Laudano called across the ground that separated them. “Do you get that? What you’re feeling right now—I did that.”

  Nothing. Laudano wondered whether the alien had access to any sort of language at all.

  It must have some level of intelligence. They know enough to collect the resources.

  He rested his gun’s muzzle on top of the hoverbike’s windshield, aiming it straight at the four-legged beast.

  Still nothing.

  He fired into its chest.

  The Quatro roared, rearing, then crashed to the ground. Laudano fired again.

  That did it. The alien charged, and Laudano took his cue. He swung the hoverbike around, keeping a close eye behind him as the beast gave chase.

  “Good,” he muttered. “That’s real good, you big dummy.”

  Chapter 5

  Raise That Gun

  Gabe paused to check his rifle’s action before continuing. Some soldiers waited till after an engagement to perform routine checks on their weapons, but that had never made sense to him. Something could go wrong with a firearm at any time, and so he liked to check his periodically.