Gun Runner

by B. V. Larson

  Astrid and her regiment operated with professionalism. They set up their shock-cannons, which operated by sending out a disruptive sonic blast, at either side of the ramp leading up to the command deck. At the last moment they slid the cannons out into the zone where Kersen’s troops were able to fire on them.

  Immediately, a storm of small-arms fire came streaming down toward the cannons. The cannons activated automatically, blasting shockwaves in millisecond pulses. We watched with camera drones as the barricades first shivered, then began to cave in, pushed backward by the force of the cannons. Likewise, the small arms fire slowed, then petered out.

  Whether they were humans or combat androids, the enemy could not withstand the continuous blasts of force. Their barricades melted, like a house of sticks in a hurricane. Their defensive firing soon ceased entirely.

  The soldiers at the base of the ramp gritted their teeth and rammed spongy plugs into their ears. My crew and I did the same. The roar of the shock-cannons came right through your helmet, your skull—there was no stopping it.

  Standing well back, my crew grimaced. Those who were closer howled in pain. It went on for a full minute, perhaps longer. It was hard to tell.

  At last, the cannons wound down. Their buzzing roar stopped, and we sighed in relief. When I heard Astrid screaming at her men a few moments later, it was with a ringing sound in my head. I suspected we all had tinnitus at that moment.

  Dazed, but regaining their senses, Astrid’s troops surged up the ramps. Magnus’ regiment joined them. Only Trask and his personal guard—who I now noted had stayed far, far back from the shock-cannons—stood quietly in reserve. Their singular job, I now realized, was to guard Trask himself.

  I was torn with indecision. Should I saunter toward Trask and sip tea, perhaps, while the rest of his men fought and died against Kersen? Or, should I join the charge up the ramp with the braver types?

  Jort was having no thoughts of indecision. He plucked at my sleeve, pointing after the rush of troops going up the ramp. His words were lost in the ringing sound, but his eyes pleaded with me.

  At last, I nodded. Taking up our rifles, we trotted behind the two assaulting regiments. We would make an appearance in this battle, at the very least. Besides, I wanted to witness Kersen’s final moments with my own eyes.

  My head had cleared somewhat by the time we reached the top of the ramp. There was no effective resistance. I saw a dozen model-Ks, stretched out in various broken states. Some had blast-holes in their chassis. Others appeared to have been hacked apart by krysteel swords. Could that be the work of the shock-cannons? I thought that it must be. A direct strike could rupture flesh, bone or even steel.

  What surprised me was the lack of actual men on the deck. So far, all of Kersen’s defensive forces had been androids. I’d thought more men of flesh and blood would have supported him. Could all those people have fled with the civilian ships we’d allowed to escape when we approached?

  Shrugging, I decided it didn’t matter, and that I didn’t care. As long as I found Kersen and killed him, this mission would be called a success. He’d had me killed once already, after all. I owed him the same favor.

  At first, the upcoming fight looked like it would be an easy one. The force-cannons had taken out the frontline defenders. There were, however, more layers to Kersen’s defenses. We’d probably given him too long to think, to prepare.

  A dozen steps past the top of the ramp, the first sword-brothers to charge with zeal were cut down. The enemy had laid a trap for us, just as we had for them. It came at a wide intersection, with the right passage going toward ops, and the other toward command staff quarters. Directly ahead was the bridge, so our troops naturally rushed in that direction.

  Crouching behind more barricades in the two side passages were real human troops—Kersen’s men. The enemy gunned down the first ten charging bravos within seconds. Astrid’s men kept pushing, however, and those with heavy armor turned toward these two sets of ambushers.

  The firefight that erupted was intense—but Kersen’s men again retreated. They fell back to another break in the corridors in both cases. Unfortunately, they’d left traps behind.

  Our armored men rushed these new barricades, powered gauntlets reaching out to tear them down. But, instead of furniture and wall panels, the men contacted electrified filaments. The filaments sparked, lit up and turned a vibrant, burning orange. This quickly changed to a glaring white. Superheated, the filaments were made of monomolecular materials that could take a great deal of power. These threads of white hot metal sliced into the troops, who charged into them the way men might when encountering cobwebs in a forest.

  They cut the mercenaries apart. Limbs fell to the deck, severed and smoking. Some of the victims screamed, some staggered in shock then toppled. All were sliced into pieces.

  I’d turned toward the ops section, and I watched the horror as our men encountered it. They never even reached the flimsy-looking barricades which were a meter farther on.

  “Dammit…” I breathed.

  Together, Jort and I raised our Sardez rifles and fired heavy bolts to blast down the barricades. We kept firing until the connection points of the deadly burning webs were also destroyed.

  Panting with exertion, the next squad looked on with concern. They were angry and willing to fight—but they’d seen some of their best die.

  Not seeing a sergeant among them, I waved for them to follow. “Advance with me!”

  They followed in my wake. Perhaps they’d been shamed, or maybe they just needed someone in command to lead them. Either way, I found myself leading two dozen troops who were more cautious now, but still filled with an urge for revenge.

  We broke into the living quarters—and there, we got a new shock. There were… pods of some kind, each the size of a melon, lying on the deck. These were connected by ropey, vine-like tubes which ran all over the floor. The pods were purply-green and some of them dripped a sticky amber fluid I suspected was some kind of blood or sap.

  Jort and I stood with our mouths gaping open. The sword-brothers who came up behind us were likewise shocked and disgusted.

  “What kind of deviltry is this?” a squire demanded.

  I glanced at him. He was young, sweat-drenched and wide-eyed. I could tell in an instant he’d never seen anything like this.

  Stepping forward, worried I would trigger a fresh trap, I poked at one of the pods. It quivered at the touch of my gun’s hot muzzle.

  With a hard boot heel, I crushed the pod. A squirming thing was inside. Pink-white, spiny… It looked like a jellyfish with spines, or some other deep-sea creature. Stunned, but not dead, the thing began to drag its injured body over the deck.

  “Tulk, sir! These pods are full of unborn Tulk!” Jort gagged and shot the thing that had wriggled out of the pod I’d stomped on. It curled up in death.

  “Destroy these pods,” I ordered. “All of them!”

  The men needed no more encouragement. Retching at times and hissing with displeasure, they stomped and blasted every cantaloupe-sized pod they could find.

  “Look, Captain,” Jort said. “These tangled vines… they run up the walls and into the vents.”

  I slashed the vines and sticky fluid splashed everywhere. The vines themselves seemed to feel pain somehow. They writhed and curled after being struck. It was disgusting.

  “Where do these vines go, sir?” Jort asked, poking at a shivering clump of them that ran up a wall nearby.

  “The big question, Jort,” I said, “is what’s on the other end of these tubes? What’s feeding these offspring?”

  There was no answer, so we fell into an orgy of killing. It was an evil thing to destroy the young of another species—but these aliens weren’t interested in peaceful coexistence. They wanted to dominate and subsume humanity wherever they could.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Over the last few centuries of spaceflight and colonization, humanity had encountered several intelligent alien species. Some
were benign, like those they called “ducks” back at the Baden Colony.

  A few, however, were true rivals. Inscrutable, strange and even evil by our standards, these beings were so powerful, so aggressive, they posed a real challenge to humans everywhere.

  I was now convinced the Tulk were one of the bad ones. They’d come to Ceti Station, and they’d quietly consumed it—just as they had attempted to do at Baden.

  Why? I now theorized that they’d come here to stop gun runners like myself. To prevent us from doing our jobs. Perhaps I’d been allowed to go on my mission in order to discover my stash of weapons, to learn all my secrets.

  Had Kersen been consumed by these aliens? I now suspected that he must have been. Why else would he have resorted to killing his own runners after a few good runs? That was no way to operate a business.

  Perhaps his real goal had been to destroy the business, not to run it wisely.

  When I discussed this with Sosa, she agreed.

  “I’ve been affected by these things,” she said. “They have variable powers over individuals. I think that power can grow over time.”

  “The way the Tulk operate does seem to vary from one case to another,” I said. “They gain control over some people like Kersen or Colonel Fletcher back on Baden, while others are more independent—like you.”

  Sosa winced with the memory. “It’s almost like having a second brain inside your body. As the tendrils go deeper and take root, you begin to have thoughts that aren’t entirely your own.”

  “Could there be more than one kind of Tulk?”

  “Maybe,” she admitted. “Maybe some have mutated, like a virus, or maybe there were different types among the species. Possibly, it’s all a matter of individual skill and knowledge. Perhaps some among them have the capability to dominate a human, while others do not.”

  “Whatever the case, it seems clear to me now that the Tulk must be exterminated at all costs. They mustn’t be allowed to take over human worlds.”

  “But how could such a goal be achieved?” Sosa asked.

  As I had no good answer, so I had to leave it at that.

  I was certainly the wrong man for the job. The Conclave hated me, and they were asleep anyway, content to maintain the status quo forever on their dull, pleasant worlds. The colony planets out on the fringe, in comparison, were war-like and tough-minded, but they lacked any kind of unity. They all viewed one another as dangerous rivals, with good reasons for doing so.

  “What now?” Jort asked me.

  The squads I’d been marching with had done a good job of destroying every pod and crawling Tulk they could find. Now, there were bigger problems to be solved.

  “Put a drone in those air tubes,” I told Sosa. “Follow the vines—let’s find out where they go.”

  Sosa took over this job. She tore the grill off a vent, and it dripped with goopy material. She then shoved a crawling spy-bot into the hole. The crawler traveled for a hundred meters before coming out on another deck.

  “The boiler rooms?” I asked.

  “It’s part of their cooling system for the reactor. It’s very hot and humid down there. They use the system to transmit heat and humidity throughout the station. It’s part of life support ops.”

  My eyes looked downward, toward the lower decks. Were we going the wrong way to find the real enemy?

  “Where we go now, Captain?” Jort asked.

  Baron Trask’s men were filing out, moving to make a final push against the bridge. Normally, that would mean victory when dealing with any defensive crew on a space station.

  “Let Trask take the command deck. We’re going back down to life support.”

  My tiny crew followed me. We separated from the rest of the mercenaries and went our own way. We got a few strange looks from the marauders, but no one asked us where we were going. We were their customers, after all, and they’d been trained not to bite the hand that fed them.

  Down on the lower decks, the station was quiet. There was nothing moving around other than ghostly breezes from the life support area.

  Taking a chance, I opened my faceplate and sniffed at the vents. They did smell wet and hot. Usually, the air on a station or ship was fairly dry. They kept the humidity at around fifty percent. That was good for human functionality, and it wasn’t too hard to maintain.

  The air coming out of that vent was like the breath of a swamp. You could feel it.

  “There’s something in there,” I said. “Something that likes it hot and wet.”

  “The interior of a human body is very hot and wet,” Sosa said. Her eyes were haunted.

  I nodded to her. “Reload, everyone—we need to be ready for anything.”

  Covering one another as we advanced down the passages, we came at last to a heavy door. It was built like a bank vault, and it was shut and locked.

  “Life support… Jort, it’s up to you and me. Let’s set both our rifles for maximum impact. We’ll blow that door down.”

  “What if you shoot right through it and damage the life support systems?” Rose asked in a worried voice.

  “The civilians on this station have already fled. Trask’s men have masks and oxygen bottles. If it kills the rest of them—so be it.”

  Together, Jort and I shouldered our Sardez weapons. They boomed and kicked almost in unison, and the big vault doors were dented and burning.

  “Again,” I said, and we took aim a second time. “On my mark… one… two… Mark!”

  We fired again, at almost the same instant. The vault door was punched through. A burnt black hole appeared in the center. We fired twice more, widening the opening enough for us to step through.

  I moved to the front—but Jort put a huge hand on my arm.

  “I’ll go in first, Captain.”

  Nodding, I let him. He stepped into the smoking hole, which was ringed by orange, molten metal.

  He swept his suit lights over the region inside, but it didn’t do much good. We couldn’t see a damned thing with all the smoke and fog. I aimed my rifle through the burning hole we’d punched in the door. We used sensors and our own eyes to scan everywhere, looking for something to shoot.

  Slowly, the vapors cleared. We were in a service area. A line of high-pressure suits hung from hooks. The walls behind the suits were made up of closets and drawers. Countless tools and other gear filled the place.

  “Come on through,” Jort said to the women. “It looks quiet enough—there sure is a lot of steam though.”

  The last of us, Rose, was just climbing through the hole we’d blasted through the door when a tiny figure stirred in the only passageway out of the place.

  “A Tulk!” Jort shouted.

  We blazed away, firing after it, but it skittered off too quickly. Like a crab on a cold beach, it ran for its life.

  Lifting our guns, we charged after the little monster. We all had a visceral desire to kill any Tulk whenever we found one. It was almost inborn.

  Even as we rushed in pursuit, I had a thought: What if this little bastard is leading us into a trap?

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  The crab-like Tulk led us into another dark chamber. This time, there was no smoke, only some steam that wasn’t thick enough to obscure our vision. Unfortunately, the sight that met my eyes was such that I wished I’d never walked into this place at all.

  A hulking thing was here—the very thing that was pumping nutrients to the eggs, or pods, or whatever those bulbous growths were up on the command deck.

  The monster resembled a giant crustacean. The shell was greenish-black that reflected our lights with a wet shine. It had clattering limbs and long, spiny pinchers.

  Jort shouted hoarsely and lifted his gun. I pushed the muzzle of his rifle toward the ceiling, and he fired a spray of rounds.

  The huge crab-thing writhed, and I could see underneath it had organic tubes running like hoses into the vents. From here, on the life support deck, it had grown its tendrils to a dozen other places.

 
“Hold up,” I said, holding Jort’s rifle away from the target. The walls glowed with orange spots where the rounds had punched into them. I didn’t hear any hissing yet, so Jort had probably not broken the space station’s seal yet again.

  “We should kill it,” Jort said firmly. “It’s a monster!”

  “Yes,” I said, unable to deny his words. “It’s a horrible thing, but maybe we can learn something about it.”

  “Captain Gorman,” Sosa said, “some kind of creatures are coming after us.”

  She pointed back along the way we’d run. Strange figures moved toward us with a humping gait. I figured they were men—or they once had been. Perhaps after you spent too long in the company of a Tulk, you ended up like these unfortunates.

  “Those guys… you can shoot,” I said, and my crew didn’t hesitate.

  A blaze of fire began, coming from two shredders and two Sardez rifles. We tore apart a dozen of the attackers, but they didn’t seem to die. Instead, they crawled on the deck, dragging themselves with their misshapen limbs and making rasping sounds. Were they crying in agony, or only breathing? I couldn’t tell.

  “Close that pressure door, and seal it,” I told Jort.

  He glanced at me, but then he did so. I turned toward the massive alien that squatted in one corner of the chamber and advanced on it.

  The limbs squirmed, and its carapace rattled. It seemed to know the danger I represented.

  “Why not kill it?” Sosa demanded. “Why not get out of here?”

  I pointed with my rifle. “Look at the side of it, up high on the right.

  She peered, and she let loose an involuntary shriek. “There’s a face—something shaped like a human face. It’s attached to the shell!”

  Rose crept forward, leaning and peering. She dug her nails into my arm. “William,” she whispered. “If this is what it’s like out here on the rim, I made a mistake. Please take me home to Prospero.”

  I laughed with a hint of bitterness. “This is worse than usual,” I admitted. “Unfortunately, I’m not sure any of us are getting out of here alive.”