Into the Maelstrom

by Loren L. Coleman

  * * *

  T he smaller creatures rushed the Irynutsk Nuclear Facility just before a late dawn broke over the southeast horizon. All was dark except for the one light over the main gate on the chain-link fence. Thin wisps of steam escaped the tower, replacing the usual funnel of thick white effluent and indicating that the Neo-Soviet personnel had at least enough sense to shut down the reactor before abandoning the power plant. Several of the winged symbiots flew overhead and straight down into the large tower, disregarding the thin steam which still vented from the turbines within. Others dropped to the ground near walls posted with yellow-and-magenta trifoil warning signs—areas the CBR rep had already verified as highly contaminated. They sank tentacles into the ground, anchoring themselves firmly to the earth. From hiding, Union troops fired on them, and two of the airborne things erupted in the cross fire. Their sagging, flesh-sack bodies split open, spilling gobbets of translucent flesh over the ground.

  Sergeant Tousley hunkered down among some hardy thistle growing near the pump house’s concrete wall, squeezing off quick bursts from the Bulldog assault rifle he’d traded for his Pitbull. Inside, the pumps continued to hum loudly as they pulled water from the nearby Kotuy River. The area was relatively uncontaminated and gave him the commanding view of the eastern approaches that he would need. This would be his squad’s last stand.

  They might have stumbled another kilometer and hoped for pickup, but the odds weren’t good. At least here they had some cover. He had already shot the lock out of the nearby pump-house door, creating a place to which he could fall back. Corporal Richardson and Private Nicholas held the roof over the main administrative building, and Lance Corporal Johnson and PFC Nash had the reinforced overhang that surrounded the tower. Kelly Fitzpatrick was on the ground, escorting the CBR rep Sainz had seen fit to attach to the squad. That brought them back to seventy-five percent strength. It was a strength that could crack under too much strain. Danielle Johnson was still little better than walking wounded from the shrapnel picked up in the first battle. Nash was new, an outsider, brought in from the Draco squad Tousley had pulled off the hill. And Loveday, the CBR guy, was all but useless in a firefight.

  Not the strongest squad for a rearguard action. Tousley knew it, and Sainz did, too. But with the alien creature moving up behind them too quickly, it came down to the simple fact that the Union forces had little choice anymore. It was make do, or do without.

  “At least he gave me the choice,” Tousley muttered, switching his line of fire to the gate as the first aliens smashed aside the meager protection it had offered. Some scuttled on crablike armored pincers. Others on thin but strong legs, their wasplike bodies hued a deep ocher.

  “Say again?” Jerry Richardson asked.

  Tousley had left his comms open. “Disregard,” he ordered. “Concentrate on those fliers. I see two perched on the side of the tower. Maybe they act like scouts.”

  It made sense. Major Howard had explained something about symbiotic organisms. If they did work together, why not in a tactical sense? That would make the first creatures on the scene scouts or pathfinders, though why they probed the ground with those tubular tentacles he didn’t understand. The armored things rushing in now he classified as common infantry. A shriek tore through the crisp morning air, that unbearable sound that shook Tousley to his core.

  And that creature out there, an army unto itself, waiting for his squad if they didn’t manage to turn its course. The creature was a kilometer distant, across the Kotuy and advancing along the southern cliffs of Gory Putorana. Its shovel-like head rose high into the air, about the same level as those bloated sacks of flesh that simply floated in a half-kilometer radius. They must be a picket, Tousley had decided. Expendable, early-warning sentries.

  “Tom, we’re evacuating the tower,” Kelly Fitzpatrick called. “It’s filling up with fliers. They’ve broken through several walls and are loose in the plant.”

  “Anything that keeps them away from here,” Richardson said. “We’re busy enough.”

  Tousley nodded his agreement, sighting in on a large specimen that slithered along, leaving a shiny, grayish trail behind. No chitin or carapace protected it. One burst tore it clean in two.

  “Well, it looks like we’re getting busier,” Fitzpatrick said. “I swear some of them are growing.”

  Tousley thumbed a recessed button on his Bulldog’s trigger guard, chambering an M-81 proximity grenade into the launcher. His next target, a walking black dome supported on tentacles and millipede legs, also had a thick carapace. He sighted in on it carefully, depressing a special button on the trigger stock and waiting for the red telltale light to flash a range lock. The strobe registered in the corner of his eye, and he squeezed off the shot. The grenade fired off on an echoing blast. The proximity feature would detonate the grenade as the range locked in, trying for incidental damage on any missed shot. He didn’t need the feature this time. His aim put it right on the forward-right quarter of the dome, blowing a large hole through it and spattering yellow-gray gunk over a ten-meter radius.

  Showing a measure of intelligence, the creatures began to fall back from the well-defended power plant. Tousley noticed at the last second that a few different types did not retreat. The ones he had thought of as alien scouts, still with tentacles probing the ground were, as Kelly Fitzpatrick had warned, getting larger. The ocher, wasp-bodied jumpers held their ground. Long, hairlike strands began to rise up on their bodies and whipped the air over them. One turned in his direction with a quick jerk and leapt.

  The thing was coming for him. Tousley saw that in the purpose with which it moved. He fired two bursts while airborne, missing the first time and tearing one leg away with the second, but that didn’t stop it. The thing landed, spitting a reddish brown globule of liquid and thick slime at him. The mess splattered off to his left, sizzling against the ground. He nearly retched at the caustic scent left behind—ruined meat mixed with the biting smells of volatile fuels. It hit him with the shock of tear gas, just as the globule began to hiss and spit even more loudly.

  Instinct took over, and Tousley pitched himself backward and rolled to the right. The substance detonated a second later, some of the fiery debris setting the thistle patch on fire. Tumbling across the ground, Tousley held on to the Bulldog with strength born of desperation. He rolled to a stop. Flat on his back, barely able to breathe through the stench, he watched as the jumper again took to the air, looking as if it would land right on top of him.

  One-handed, he brought up his assault rifle, firing it in one long burst and praying that this wouldn’t cause one of the ammunition jams for which the Bulldog was infamous. The assault rifle waved around at the bare edge of control, cutting a line of armor-piercing bullets through the air and right across the creature’s head. It fluttered in the air, fighting the hail of bullets, even as the sergeant rolled to his side and gained full control over the rifle with both hands. He drilled the creature hard and steady, stopping its powerful leap and driving it back.

  “Watch the jumpers,” he called out in warning over the squad’s common channel. “They can spit some kind of—”

  The warning came too late. Screaming cut him off in mid-sentence. Tousley crabbed about, keeping to the ground while trying to find his men in trouble. Fliers were now rising slowly from the tower-funnel and heading back toward the advancing alien. A few were also stirring about on the ground; having grown too bloated to fly, they walked on stunted legs.

  He cut the feet out from under one with a quick burst of fire, then left it thrashing about helpless when he finally spotted where the trouble was. Richardson and Nicholas were on top of the administration building, and two of the wasp-bodied jumpers were clinging to the corner of the roof, bodies hanging halfway over the side. Some new fliers were also dropping in, but not the sagging-flesh ones of before. These were hard-bodied, looking like chitinous spears flying on membrane wings. They dipped and dodged over the roof. Higher up one of the floaters hung motionles
s, as if overseeing the entire attack.

  “Nash, what are you waiting for?” Tousley screamed, his voice loud enough to carry to the reinforced overhang where the Draco-packing infantrymen hid. No need for radio. “You see those jumpers? Take them out! Everyone else give them some covering fire. Keep those fliers off them.”

  The fire from three assault rifles streaked across the rooftop at the spear-shaped attackers. One blazed briefly as it slammed into the corner of the building and threw an ocher-hued Spitter over the other side. Confusion reigned among the creatures for a moment, and a figure in green fatigues took a chance and ran for the side of the building. He stooped long enough to pick up another body, then threw himself and his buddy off the roof. It was a long fall, nearly six meters. The bodies hung in the air a long second, and then bounced off the ground once, hard, and were still.

  “Still . . . here . . .” A voice strained in pain and faint from lack of breath. Tousley placed it as Jim Nicholas rather than Jerry Richardson’s bass voice. “Broken ribs . . . and hand burned . . . badly. Corporal’s dead.”

  Anger made Tousley clench his jaw so tight it hurt. “Kelly and Loveday, get them out of there. Danielle, give them supporting fire. Nash, keep hitting the jumpers where you see them.” The battle was slipping from his grasp, and he knew it. Too many creatures, not enough Union. He would retreat, if they had anywhere to retreat to. And if they made a run for it, the jumpers would have them in less than two hundred meters. He searched the area for a solution, and saw only the thrashing flier he’d wounded earlier. Its bloated body gushed more of the small gobbets, just like the stuff he’d seen when the Neo-Soviets wounded the alien’s tentacle. He could still picture those gobbets pouring over the Chem Grunt, which had—

  Melted. Blistered, burned, and melted.

  He looked around frantically, finding the largest concentration of fliers near a large tank suspended above the ground. “Loveday! What’s that area on the side of the tower? The tank—it looks like it’s set up to drop something into a waiting truck below.”

  “Ion resin exchanger. You flush old resin into it, and then from there it’s loaded into special carriers.”

  “Radioactive?” It had to be, Tousley knew.

  The answering voice was a mixture of curiosity and exasperation. “Of course. Highly radioactive. Next to the fuel, it’s about the worst stuff you can pull out of the reactor compartment.”

  That was exactly what Tousley wanted to hear. He brought up the Bulldog, sighting in on the tank as he chambered a new grenade. The first one fell low, blowing a flier into shredded flesh and those translucent gobbets that he thought of as blood. His second shot hit the tank on the lower taper, rupturing the thick metal at a welded seam. Resin beads trickled out in a small but steady flow, small and clear and looking much like the capsulelike flesh globules the creatures bled. Looking very much like them. The fliers did not evade the deadly substance as his people would have. They flocked to it, driving the tentacles deep into the growing pile of resin.

  “We’re getting out of here,” Tousley said at once. “Head for the rear fence line and don’t fire unless attacked. We’ll blow a stretch and make our way northwest.”

  Kelly Fitzpatrick and her group were hobbling in that direction, she bearing up a wounded Nicholas and Loveday struggling under the weight of Corporal Richardson’s body. Danielle and Nash, from their vantage point, could not have seen the resin exchanger.

  “What gives, Sarge?” Danielle asked. “I thought you said we couldn’t hope to make rendezvous. Better to go down fighting here than in retreat.”

  Tousley followed his retreating squad, swinging wide around the deadly jumpers. “Those fliers, they aren’t scouts, Danielle. They’re feeders. Those things thrive on radiation—look where they’re landing. They soak it up—ingest it somehow—and take it back to that . . . that thing bearing down on us. We’re not gonna turn it away from here. We’re sitting on its food source! If there’s a worse place to be than between an animal and its food, I don’t know it. We’re gonna take the chance and try and slip away. Now move it!”

  As his people fell back in good order, Tousley still felt a twinge at the order to retreat. At any other time, he might have agreed with Danielle and stayed to fight it out. He was certainly tired of running away, and it seemed like that’s all the Union had been doing of late. Running from the Fifty-sixth Striker, and now from this alien thing. He ejected his clip and slapped in a fresh one. At some point someone had to draw a line and say “no farther.” Everyone had that point buried somewhere within, and he knew himself enough to feel his wasn’t far off. Perhaps not now, or even today.

  But sometime soon.

  * * *

  “I believe we were speaking of how to control that Sleeper,” Colonel Katya Romilsky said, turning a withering eye on her aide. Gregor Antoly should have seen this—guessed this. “Do we have doubts any longer as to what it needs?”

  The two of them stood among the ruins of the Irynutsk Facility. The ground was torn up from the Sleeper’s passage, and several buildings had caved in from being sideswiped by its massive bulk. The tower had been ripped open when the creature smashed aside the thick walls and burrowed down into the underground reactor. The administrative building stood with only a single hole blasted into the wall near the roofline. It could be remanned, but the operators and officers would be overseeing a dead plant.

  Gregor held a detector capable of registering gamma and beta radiation. Not one single chirp bounced the needle, except when too near one of the Fifty-sixth’s own mutants.

  “Clean,” Gregor said, obviously in awe. “Not one bit of contamination left. And every piece of nuclear fuel is missing as well. Could you imagine what we might accomplish with the ability to clean up all our radiological problem areas? What that creature could do if we could release it against the Union?”

  “Can you understand what it is doing to our empire?” Romilsky snapped at him in frustration. “I want to know how to kill it.”

  “You can’t kill it,” Gregor said. “It needs to be captured. Studied. The advances the empire might make are inestimable.”

  She shook her head angrily. “It became too late for that once the Sleeper destroyed Irynutsk. It is a danger to the empire. I am not about to allow it to wander around ripping open our power plants or missile silos.” Or anything more critical. “We are out of time, Gregor Detchelov.”

  He flapped his arms in frustration. “What do you mean, no time? It’s heading into the deeper folds of Gory Putorana, chasing the Union force up the Kotuy.”

  “I know exactly where it’s heading. Colonel Sainz did not fall back along the Kotuy on purpose. He wanted the Upper Tunguska. With the Leonid we would have been there to meet him, but he missed the only pass his antigrav craft might have taken. He is now trapped in between Gory Putorana and the Sleeper, and so presses deeper to the north. Right where I placed him.” She sounded concerned, even to herself.

  “But that is a good thing,” Detchelov said. “Let the Sleeper destroy him for us.”

  Komilsky didn’t respond, not trusting her voice. Gregor was becoming an unknown factor in the battle, and the last thing she wanted was to give him cause to doubt her commitment to destroying the Seventy-first.

  “I will find a way to bring the Sleeper to heel, Comrade Colonel. I promise you.”

  “You are not listening, Gregor. By this afternoon I will have to make some difficult decisions, but one of them will not be how best to capture this creature. The next time I spend troops against it, I expect to kill it.” She let an edge of steel touch her voice. “And you will help me do that because that is how I order it. Is that understood?”

  It was clear that he wanted to argue, but the hard look she gave him obviously changed his mind. Katya Romilsky saw the anger give way to wariness in Gregor’s black eyes. She nodded to dismiss him even as she gestured forward the slight man waiting off to one side under guard.

  Gregor Detchelov frowned sli
ghtly, then bowed his leave to Romilsky. She watched him as he passed near a group of Rad Troopers, suddenly imagining him grabbing a weapon or acting out some other form of rebellion, but then she eased as he continued on without incident. Gregor could be wily and devious when it came to ferreting out information she needed, and in battle he was an asset to draw upon. Katya Romilsky knew now she had almost made a mistake.

  Because she had never once, until now, believed Gregor Detchelov capable of being a threat. But she had read the murder in his dark eyes. He would bear watching.

  “Yes.”

  Romilsky started visibly. She rounded on the Mental who had landed the Leonid Sergetov—nearly crashed it, actually—near her position during the cataclysm that had robbed Terra of its familiar sky. He had been unable to speak coherently for half a day, mumbling to himself but not recognizing anyone else around him. Slowly he’d come back to some semblance of awareness, though he still trembled in silence when asked about the crossover.

  The man was stoop-shouldered and frail, as if he’d spent too many years under some tremendous weight. Only his eyes were truly alive, one blue one green, with a piercing quality that bothered her. She decided not to ask, though, if he saw danger. If he did, he would say. Anyway, the next Mental to give a straight answer to a direct question about their abilities would be the first in her experience.

  “Comrade,” she said, using it as more an official title than a friendly custom, “I regret that you may not yet be returned to Noril’sk. We have”—she gestured around at the devastation—“several problems to attend to, and the Leonid is desperately needed here.”

  “Not the least of which is your tale to Colonel Sainz about Chernaya Gora, Tovarish Romilsky.”

  She worked hard not to show that she was disturbed by the Mental’s familiar address, and his foreknowledge of the story she’d told Colonel Sainz. “The Leonid can serve to block any attempt by Union Command to reach Sainz, yes. Though it is a matter of time before a battle station is brought overhead, and then they will be in communication with their superiors before we are.”