When they eased off, Scott lay there twitching and vomiting in his death throes. The Grunts’ mutagen mixture caused his flesh to erupt in fungus-like growths, rapidly mutating but without any controlled direction at all. The regular toxins blistered the flesh and attacked his internals as well. Tousley devoted one careful shot to end the man’s suffering, then dropped back to cover as a violent new quake shook the hillside.
“Damn it all to hell,” he swore aloud, then triggered his comm system on a general channel. “We’ve lost Brian.”
Kelly jumped back in quickly, voice concerned. “POW?” she asked.
He knew the rest of his men would be hanging on his answer. Union infantry did not leave their people behind. In the Seventy-first, Raymond Sainz was fanatical about it, a marginally redeeming quality. Not even bodies were abandoned if it could be helped.
“No, not taken, thank God. But there will be no pickup.” That was expected when facing Chem Grunts, but no one liked leaving a body behind. “The body’s gunked. We have to leave it for the CBR boys.”
He patted a number of empty pockets in his tactical load-bearing system. He switched back to a private frequency with Fitzpatrick. “I’m also down to three clips,” he told her, warning her that time was short.
“What about your Pug?” The tension in Fitzpatrick’s voice was audible even through transmission.
“I left two bullets.”
“Save one for me,” she said, voice again light and easy. Neither one of them would be taken alive, or wanted to end their final moments as Brian Scott had.
“Kelly, you’ve got the height up there. Try to tight-beam a message back to Sainz. Ask for instructions.”
“Copy that!” Kelly Fitzpatrick said, sounding relieved.
Tousley hated to apply for Sainz’s assistance, but after what happened to Brian Scott he had to do something before all his men fell to a similar fate. It bothered him that Fitzpatrick also seemed to think it the best move under the circumstances, making him wonder if he should have done so earlier. He cursed again, privately, then spent a long moment with Private Nicholas, riding the tremors and spraying lead down the hillside.
There was more grinding as rock pulverized under stress, then a huge portion of the eastern facing gave way. But instead of cascading down in an avalanche that might bury the Neo-Soviets, as he’d hoped earlier, it collapsed inward as if caving in over an immense space. Dust billowed up, carrying a heavy, acrid-metallic scent. Tousley clung to a nearby outcropping, several times almost pitching off to tumble down the hill.
The screech that tore through the air as the quake subsided reminded him of rusty hinges crossed with the crackling roar of a forest fire. It grated on his ears, and his survival instinct told him it was the call of something alive. And something dangerous. It sounded again as a new tremor finally shook him off his perch and fetched him right to the brink of the ledge on which he stood. It knocked the breath from his lungs and almost threw him over the edge before subsiding. Tousley held on for a second to catch his breath, hoping the worst was over.
It wasn’t.
From the billowing dust, a gray-green tentacle rose and flailed about in the air. Most of it was covered in overlapping chitinous segments, but one side exposed creamy, black-speckled flesh with long, hairlike tendrils that waved and whipped about of their own accord. A dry, rustling-rattle sounded from their rubbing together.
Tousley stared at it dumbly, his head peering over the edge of the rock outcropping. When he shifted his gaze into the sloped tunnel from which the giant tentacle rose, he saw smaller creatures working their way up from dark depths beneath. They dripped a black fluid as some crawled and others leapt forward on slender but impossibly strong legs. One spread out membranes like wings and took to the air, circling around the tentacle like a strange moth fluttering about a moving light. Deep down one sinkhole, directly beneath Tousley’s line of sight, something large—some things large—moved about in the darkness like the coils of a giant snake sliding around together.
Stark terror claimed him for a moment. This was no hill! There was something under it—within it—being disturbed by the fighting going on above.
He shook off the mind-numbing fright and collected his wits. Someone who had witnessed and survived the previous day’s events could not be kept down long. He inched slowly back from his precarious perch, then froze when a half dozen Chem Grunts rose up from concealment below. They cut loose with chemsprayers and toxic grenades against the strange creatures and the violently moving tentacle.
Jets of toxins pinned two creatures against a rock ledge, sending them into convulsions. The grenades fell deeper into the tunnel, detonating and causing another of the hideous screeches. The tentacle smashed downward, crushing one Grunt into a smear of blood and chemicals. When the tanks blew, it shredded the creamy flesh and cracked the chitinous armor. Small, fleshy gobbets spilled out of the wound like some kind of semisolid blood. A cascade of the gobbets poured over one Grunt, which dropped its chemsprayer and began to melt. Clothing and flesh sloughed away, leaving behind metal and heat-blistered bone.
PFC Jim Nicholas had raised up to fire down on the creature, and now stood mesmerized by the horrific scene below. Tousley switched back to an open channel.
“Jim, fall back slowly and stay off the channel,” he ordered, then returned to the scene down below. Tousley had known it would take some kind of intervention to make it out alive, but this wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind.
The telltale whistle of falling artillery forced his head down. It exploded downslope, and when he looked he saw the tentacle now mangled in a dozen places by shrapnel and withering like a dying vine. Its hairlike tendrils rustled and found one more Chem Grunt, wrapping about an arm and pulling it down after it as it retreated back into the hillside. A second later there was a new explosion and another of the nightmare screeches.
“Tom, I have Colonel Sainz on the squawk box.” Fitzpatrick sounded way too cheerful. Or maybe only compared to the horrific scene below. “The main force is on the move and following along our own trail, moving southwest along the base of the hill. If we can hold, they’ll pull us out. I’ve already warned them about the chemical spills.” She paused a second. “I recommend the cliff-face approach. It will let us last longer.”
Tousley watched as the last Vanguard infantryman broke cover below and retreated back along his route of ascent while waving the Chem Grunts forward. Sprayers held ready, the Grunts moved in pairs into the large tunnel, jets of chemicals clearing back the smaller creatures and opening up a path for them. Tousley hastily retreated.
“Negative,” he ordered. “It’s over the top and down the other side fast as we can go. You tell Colonel Sainz that he better button up the infantry and kick the vehicles into overdrive. And skirt this hill by a fair margin.”
“Are you joking? What about the Grunts?”
“I’ve never been more serious, Kelly.” A new tremor, and a long drawn-out screech from nightmares. “The Grunts are no longer our problem. There’s something . . . sleeping under all this rock. And whatever it is, I’m afraid they’re waking it up.”
Fitzpatrick didn’t sound amused. “The colonel will want more than that, Tom.”
Catching up with Private Nicholas who was walking unsteadily, shivering and with eyes wild, Tousley grabbed him beneath one arm and helped him along.
“If I had it, Kelly, I’d tell him,” he barked back. “All I can say now is we’d all better pray that we don’t find out more.”
14
* * *
F our armies paired off in battle across the Solstice Plains below Luna’s Point Gagarin. Neo-Soviet forces spread over two square kilometers, finding cover where able and laying down heavy fire against Union positions. The smaller Union regiment relied on Ares heavy-assault suits and automated defense drones to supplement what few space-specialist Marines they had deployed there. And in the reflective finish of the bizarre landscape, the grayish soil seeming
ly fused into a flow of perfect silvered glass, mirror images of both armies formed a second battlefield being fought by duplicates of the soldiers above.
Cocooned inside almost two tons of walking armor and weapons, the Ares assault suit made Corporal Phillipe Savoign one of the most powerful warriors ever to set foot upon a field. That only made it harder to admit that the Neo-Soviets were winning both battles.
Owning seventy percent of Luna’s surface gave the Union a large area to defend, better than thirty-five million square kilometers. When the fence line had been in place to warn of Neo-Soviet incursions, they’d accomplished that defense via fast response and technological superiority. But what little of the fence line remained after the strange event—what Major Williams called the Induction—the Neo-Soviets had smashed and poured through large numbers of troops and equipment.
More troops, in fact, than anyone had thought the empire possessed on Luna. Mostly Vanguard infantry and mutants, they had already captured two atmosphere processors and the base at Montlake Crater. Union intelligence had obviously underestimated the full extent of the Neo-Soviet lunar warrens and the ambition of the empire’s local commander. With the Union’s first line of defense crippled by the Induction, General Tamas Yorikev had made several vicious and successful stabs into Union territory.
The Neo-Soviets also fielded equipment never before encountered. Battle platforms the size of a small desk were driven around on small treads by a kneeling man. These platforms allowed a single soldier to move missile batteries or heavy machine guns into place in much the same way that the Union relied on ADDs. Though slower than antigrav drones, the platforms allowed the Neo-Sovs to hold a strong rear line while Vanguard and the larger mutants pushed forward.
Still, it shouldn’t have been enough. And wouldn’t have been, except for the treacherous terrain the Neo-Soviets had discovered and now exploited. Twenty thousand square kilometers, as smooth and shiny as glass. Boulders and the occasional crater still rose up in familiar grayish white, but everywhere else the soil of the Solstice Plains had been replaced by the mirrored terrain. The reflections played all hell with visual-imaging software, forcing the Ares suits and drones to rely on the less accurate thermal imaging.
And that was only one of the problems presented by the alien landscape.
Savoign tried not to think about it, finding it an affront to his sanity. Combat, fortunately, had a way of diverting a person from just about anything else. Now a red bar flashed over a small area of the virtual landscape projected onto Savoign’s visored helm. The VR lens clusters mounted outside the Ares’ cockpit focused in on the threat and the suit’s computers magnified the image to show a new spearhead of Vanguard infantry moving forward under cover of missile fire. Reddish contrails streaked overhead to fall on Savoign’s location, one impacting the Ares’ upper left leg and blasting away armor but little else.
The large gyrostabilization module bulking out from the assault suit’s back kept Savoign on his mechanized feet. His shoulder-mount option held a fifteen-centimeter Harbinger rail gun, but Savoign knew that was not quite the weapon of choice for smashing infantry. He drew a bead on the lead Vanguard elements with targeting software that responded to his eye motions, then raised his right arm, which brought into play the more precise antipersonnel “enforcer” weapon mounted on it. The APE mauled the advancing soldiers. Eleven-millimeter steel-jacketed slugs hammered one man into an unrecognizable mess of ruined flesh and cracked and splintered body armor. The others fell back to the protective wall of a crater.
Savoign had stalled the advance, but the missile site remained a problem. He moved his jaw forward, enabling his transmitting ability. “This is Twelve. I’m angling forward-right for a missile platform.”
An answering call came back at once from Lieutenant Chilsun. “Copy, Ares Twelve. Five, forward-left and assist.”
Savoign frowned behind his visor, considering the backup unnecessary. One assault suit could handle the job alone. For a few seconds he said nothing, knowing he lacked formal tactical schooling.
Then again, he recalled, so did Chilsun. “Twelve can handle this. No sense putting two suits at risk.”
“Thank you for the advice, Corporal. But if you get in trouble out there, I want Five ready to cover you.” Chilsun sounded more flustered than angry.
Savoign bit back any reply, then risked several dozen powerful strides forward and to his right, wary of the slick surface and the semiliquid pools that had already trapped two Ares and pulled them down beneath the reflective surface. Without any way to spot the quickglass areas before putting weight on them, every step put the man and machine at risk. One of the faster-acting pools had caught Captain de Rico’s Hades while trying to set down below the lip of a crater wall, which was why Chilsun was now trying to salvage something out of this fiasco.
The Vanguard infantry that had taken cover not two hundred meters downrange fired away at him with their Kalashnikovs, but the slugs ricocheted harmlessly. The chances of an assault rifle bullet, high-explosive or armor-piercing, damaging an Ares were slim. Even a Rottweiler needed a lucky hit in just the right spot to cause trouble, but to the Ares it would still be only an inconvenience, not a disability.
Of more concern were the Kalashnikovs’ grenade launchers. Though the moon’s lighter gravity allowed them to fire over these ranges, accuracy was another thing. Savoign’s Ares shrugged off one blast that slammed into the shoulder shield plate and another that clipped his left shoulder and destroyed the searchlight not in use anyway. Then Five moved up and behind him, drawing their fire away while Savoign searched out the missile platform.
He flicked his eyes around the four corners of the virtual-reality screen, while the Ares’ computer cycled through the various imaging systems. Thermal was less than ideal for range. Upper right, magnetic. Lower right, back to straight visual.
“Magnify, times ten,” he ordered, verbally overriding the automatic threat-analysis package built into the left-shoulder pod’s extensive electronic gear. The lens clusters refocused, and imaging software firmed up the lines. He found the mobile missile platform crouched between two boulders a half klick away. In Luna’s light gravity, an easy shot.
Savoign focused on the upper line of the small crawler, and with the squeeze of one hand sent out an ingot from the shoulder-mounted Harbinger rail gun. The imaging software failed to paint the projectiles onto the VR landscape, but the small platform suddenly burst apart in a fury of shredded metal and sympathetic detonation of the remaining missiles. The boulders channeled much of it upward until they disintegrated under the force of the explosion.
Savoign thrust his jaw forward again to activate the comm. “Scratch one missile site.”
His victory was to be short-lived, however. “Magnification off,” he ordered, noting that Ares Five held a position just forward and off his left, having swung completely around behind him. A pair of Vanguard had rushed forward from the cover of the crater to work at the Ares with heavy fire, slipping beneath the assault suit’s large weapons. Now they retreated before Five could readjust for close-in support. Five took another dozen steps forward, intent on following them back into the crater and clearing it like a nest of vermin.
“Five, no!” Savoign yelled, his own voice deafening in his helmet. Ten meters short of where the Vanguard had begun their retreat, Ares Five took one final step and froze in position. Then he began to sink rapidly.
It was no accident. The Vanguard had snared Ares Five into a quickglass pool. They seemed to know where all the pools were. Savoign had a vision of the Neo-Soviets marching their Rad Troopers over the area, using expendable warriors to map out each pool’s location. Likely he wasn’t far off the truth.
“Ares Five is trapped and evacuating,” the other suit broadcast, sounding angry at himself.
Chilsun was angry, too. Three Ares suits lost and the captain gone, and nothing to show for it but Vanguard and a few missile platforms. “Get out of there, Davies. Twelve, make p
ickup.”
Savoign shook his head. “He’s not going to make it,” he whispered to himself, not about to transmit and make those the last words Corporal Miles Davies would hear. It was a fact, though. It required ten seconds to extract oneself from the cockpit of an Ares, and that usually with help. Five seconds later, Davies’ heavy assault suit was gone, vanished into his reflection without a ripple, just that rapid melt into the alien matter. Savoign shivered, his brain trying to grasp the event and unable to truly accept what his own eyes were relaying to it. At least, with the quickglass making radio contact impossible, they wouldn’t have to listen to the screams of a man buried alive.
“Five is gone,” he said simply.
“That’s it,” Chilsun ordered. “Fall back, Twelve. All units retreat. I want every Ares to lay out a smoke screen.”
Gritting his teeth at the order, Savoign cycled his control from the Harbinger to the grenade launchers that rose up on either side of the cockpit hatch. His left hand selected four, wide dispersal; he pressed forward with one palm and they spat upward in high but narrow arcs. As he stepped back deeper into the curtain of smoke laid out by the grenades, Savoign wanted to shake his head in disgust.
Pitfalls, he said to himself. They beat multimillion-dollar equipment, and they effectively did it with pitfalls. Just what was going on? When would the strangeness end? Never, his own mind whispered up from the darker recesses. And he doubted this would be the last oddity, or the Union’s last defeat.
These were not thoughts that sat well with the weapons specialist, and ones he knew would continue to plague him. It was a long walk back to Tycho Crater.
* * *
The room was only big enough to hold a long table with three chairs to a side. It had been painted an antiseptic white to increase the edginess of subjects brought there. A large mirror was set into one wall, no doubt one-way glass with a video camera and who knew how many people on the other side.
Into the Maelstrom Page 12