by Shawn Jones
Ben looked at the map, too. When it disappeared, he asked Cort to show it to him again.
Cort turned and reactivated his projector. When the map came back up, Ben looked at it for a moment then pointed at a section that was over a bulkhead seam. He traced a line through the image that led back to a small room. It appeared to be isolated except for a passage to the engine area and one to the bridge.
Cort said, “That’s where we need to go.”
Ben said, “I think so. It makes sense.”
“Okay, let’s head there. Rai, keep a squad at the entrances here. At least three for each of the doors.”
“Sir, minus the men we have guarding Bazal’s people, and six we’ve lost, that leaves ten of us to cover the rest of the ship, and it’s a big ship.”
“We need to get that hull down, Rai. It’s their drive system, too. Taking it down is the only way to stop the ship now. We’ll address staffing afterward. Order everyone to tie off, and make sure the octopods are secure.”
“Yes, sir.”
It took ten minutes to make their way through the ship to their target. A dozen of the exoskeletal beings, none of which had a humanoid host, were massed in Cort’s path, feeding on a fallen CONDOR. They had ocular organs of some sort that Cort hadn’t noticed on the ones he had encountered, and some held weapons of their own. Realizing the exos were armed with Ares railguns, Cort disabled the weapons with his command codes.
Between the exoskeletons and the door to the room was another fallen CONDOR with three broken combat drones around it. There was no sign of life from the suit. Now there were two of the enemies manipulating the suit, while several others consumed the Marine inside it. Still others were attached to the graphene coated drones.
Just to be sure the occupant really was dead, Cort scanned the dead suit. What the hell? He sent his telemetry to the other two men. “What do you make of that?”
“I got nuttin.” Woolf said.
“Rai?”
“Beats me, sir. Should we kill the bastards?”
“My gut says no. Something important is happening, and we need to find out what it is. I’m going to hit the body with a dose of synthetics. Just to boost the ones that are still alive in the corpse.” Cort took command of the fallen CONDOR and injected its occupant with an emergency dose of synthetics.
Cort’s scans showed the biosynthetic nanites were turning the tables on the seahorse-like exoskeletons. Designed to immunize humans and wolves from disease and rapidly heal injuries, the biosynthetic blood supplement was attacking the exoskeletons that tried to take control of the CONDOR’s deceased human occupant. There were nearly a million synthetics in a cubic centimeter of blood, and when the Marine died, the additive shouldn’t have continued to function, but in this case, it found a new source for the nutrition that allowed it to reproduce.
The nanites fought valiantly, even though their original host was dead. Cort scanned more nanites living in the exoskeleton than there were still alive in their original body. In fact, they were replicating inside the exoskeleton and eating it, from the inside out.
Cort used the fallen CONDOR to hit one of the exoskeletons with another dose of synthetics, and issued orders. “This is Ares. If you come into contact with an alien exoskeleton, hit it with an emergency dose of synthetics. Hell, hit with two. The nanites are eating the damned things.”
When Cort disconnected from the command channel, Rai said, “They aren’t supposed to do that, sir. I’m not a medic, but synthetics aren’t supposed to work that way.”
Information flooded Cort’s HUD, and it showed that the ship had stopped moving. It was orbiting a planet that was one point three times the gravity of Earth. Schwartz noticed it, too, and commed Cort for instructions.
“Check the hull. Is it still intact?”
A moment later, Schwartz confirmed it was, but that it had become transparent and he could see the planet below. He sent the image to Cort, who began to curse.
“It’s Threm. Oh fuck!” Cort began running toward the enemy. “Kill them!” Opening the command channel, he ordered, “Marines, tie off and tether the octopods. We are going to breach the hull. Prepare for catastrophic decompression!”
He charged his rail gun and fired a round into the mass of exoskeletons that had been blocking his way. It took two more shots to clear the area, and another low-powered one to open the door to the room beyond them. Inside, he severed every cable and conduit he could see. The molecular blade of his combat sword made short work of the enemy equipment, and Cort knew he was destroying the right systems when he finally received a signal from George.
“Father, do you read me?”
“Yes. Five by five. What’s the situation outside?”
“The enemy ship has launched an invasion of Threm.”
“What? How? They don’t have enough people for that.”
“It appears they do. I am reading over a hundred thousand small exoskeletons leaving the ship and entering Threm’s atmosphere.”
“Have Siella…” Cort stopped himself. Siella wouldn’t begin protecting the planet for over three hundred years. “How the fuck did they get an invasion force?”
“The pieces.” Rai said.
“What?”
“All the pieces we broke off. They weren’t dead. Just dormant. That’s the only answer. They turned themselves off.”
Cort knew Rai was right. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck! We gave them a godsdamned invasion force!”
Cort ordered George to bring the Remington close enough to the enemy ship that the two could be tethered together. When the barrels of the Ares ship were within a few meters of the enemy ship, Clem’s team, standing on the Remington, threw lines to Schwartz’s men. They laid printed planks between the two ships just as Cort emerged from an airlock. A bosun’s whistle blew as Cort stepped back onto his own ship, and Clem saluted him.
Looking at his great-grandfather, he said, “We don’t do that anymore, Clem. I did away with all the pomp and circumstance a long time ago.”
“Yes, sir. And I brought it back. It’s part of what makes a military man feel special, and we are. My men like the idea. Put up with if for a day or two, then decide. Welcome aboard the Remington, General.”
“Uh huh.”
Cort told Clem to prepare a shuttle bay for prisoners, and another for the octopods. Then the two men walked the length of the barrel while Cort issued new orders to George. By the time Cort reached the medical bay, hundreds of drones were being printed to hunt the exoskeletons on the surface of Threm.
Clem left to carry out his orders as Cort turned into Ceram’s office. The insectoid was on Solitude with Kim, but another medico turned to acknowledge Cort just as the general’s CONDOR crumpled to the ground.
Six
Cort awoke in a medical bed with a dark-skinned woman he didn’t know standing over him.
“What happened?”
She spoke, but Cort didn’t understand her. He touched his ear, and she held up one finger and handed Cort a comm unit. He fitted the tiny device into his right ear and asked his question again.
“You had another stroke, General Addison. They are going to become more frequent, and more severe. We are now certain they are stress related, and you will only have a few more before your wife begins planning your memorial.”
The woman tried in vain to hold Cort down when he sat up. “You have to stay here! You just had a stroke!”
“Thank you, but no.” Cort turned and pushed himself off the bed as Clem walked into the room.
“Talk to me, Clem” Cort said.
“You are…”
“On Threm. What’s going on?”
Rai and Schwartz were using what few military resources they had, to keep the exos from getting access to the planet’s interior, via the Threm surface elevators. George was using drones and point defense systems on the shuttle to attack the exos from the air.
“Now about the aliens. I guess I’ve been out for a while. What have you learned ab
out them?”
Clem activated a hologram with his flexpad and showed Cort the symbiotic alien. After a moment, the elf separated from the exoskeleton, and Clem explained they were two entirely different species. He had also interrogated one of the elves and learned their history.
“They call themselves Erom. I think they’re peaceful, and I’ve had to make special air for them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Their natural environment is both lower gravity, and lower oxygen, than what we need.”
“Tell me their story, briefly.”
The Erom were originally from a planet in the Gryll universe that was only forty percent the mass of Earth or Solitude, and they thrived on carbon dioxide. A plant-like species, they reproduced both sexually and asexually. They were gender neutral, and the comm translators identified pronouns that translated to xyr and xe, in place of the gender-based pronouns of other species.
Several colonies of the species had left their home system and colonized many different worlds. One colony was founded on a planet originally thought to be uninhabited, but which actually harbored the exoskeleton species. This parasitic species quickly overcame the Erom, took over their musculoskeletal systems, and subjugated the species on that world. The colony ship was taken to Gryll, where the exos found the Earthlike atmosphere too harsh for the Erom.
Cort asked, “Why did they go to Gryll then?”
The exos once controlled the planet, and the abduction process, until they were overcome by the Gryll. The abductions were the exos’ method of colonization. They pulled hosts through the wormhole, then invaded the Ares universe using abductees. When the Gryll arrived, the exoskeletons used an abducted species to escape the planet.
The three Erom that Clem spoke to did not know anything else about the exos. The Gryll had admitted to Cort that they had taken the planet from another species, after being genetically engineered for the task. Cort now knew who that species was.
Cort touched his ear, to hear George tell him that Threm’s intense magnetic field, which had helped the inhabitants hide from the Gryll, was also interfering with George’s control of the drones. Marines on Threm’s surface had marginally better success with the automated weapons, but only if they were in close proximity. Lieutenant Schwartz had ordered the Marines clearing surface structures of the planet to utilize the drones as a force multiplier, and to keep Marines from being placed in direct jeopardy.
George could control drones that were directly below the ship, and was doing so, focusing his own efforts on areas that were hardest hit by the exoskeleton invasion. Against both Clem’s and the doctor’s wishes, Cort ordered George to ready a shuttle to take him to the surface, so he could oversee the battle his Marines were fighting on the planet below.
On the way to the shuttle bay, Cort changed direction and commed Clem to meet him in the ship’s magazine, where the Erom were being held. Cort was about to walk into the holding area when Clem arrived and reminded him the atmosphere had been adjusted inside. Ten minutes later, Cort was back in his CONDOR and stepping through a makeshift airlock.
Without exos wrapped around their bodies, Cort thought the Erom were more human-like than he first believed. They were, indeed, nearly three meters tall, almost as tall as Cort’s CONDOR, but were thick and muscular. If it weren’t for their skulls and shoulders, human clothing would be enough to make them appear as oversized men. Their skulls were elongated, with two horn-like ridges running their length in the places where a human might part their hair, and their shoulders were bulbous, giving the appearance that they could rotate much further back than their human counterparts. They didn’t have human reproductive organs, at least not visibly, and they did not seem to be clothed.
When the airlock cycled Cort into the room, two of the beings approached him. Clem told him the comm system had fully translated the Erom language, and Cort began questioning them. It took a few minutes to confirm what Clem had learned, and Cort found he could read the Erom more easily than he did humans.
They were indeed, slaves to the exos, who had been using them for generations to travel the Gryll universe, in search of a species they could use to take back their planet. They knew nothing of the exos’ plans to stop Cort and the Remington, or why they wanted to stop him. Cort offered them safe passage to their own universe, but not until the exo war was over, and the Remington was back in its home time.
—
On the surface of Threm, Cort was reminded of crews battling wildfires. There was a rough battle line, with only human Marines and George’s drones working to contain the enemy. But it was a hard fight. While lone pieces of the exoskeletons were slow and easy to find, the pieces that found hosts on the fauna of Threm escaped through the battle lines.
“What’ve you got, Rai?”
“Just what George told you, General. A clusterfuck.”
“Show me your plan.”
Rai pointed to a printed building.
Cort walked into the command post on the surface of Threm, thanking the gods he didn’t believe in that the wormhole to the Gryll universe was active enough that the people of Threm were staying underground and keeping out of his way as he waged war on their planet’s surface.
Threm had struggled with abductions as well, until the inhabitants moved below the surface of the planet into the protection of its very strong magnetic field. They knew the wormhole, which they called a black star, was the source of the abductions, so they only ventured to parts of the surface that didn’t face the wormhole, where they were shielded by the planet’s extreme energy.
Cort’s first visit to Threm had been when his task force was about to traverse the wormhole in the effort to rescue the abducted humans. At that time, the peaceful, agricultural society was just as incapable of defending itself as it was now, so Cort had assigned a small force to protect Threm’s solar system and the entrance to the wormhole. Though he couldn’t remember much about his visit to the planet since his stroke, he took his future pledge seriously enough that he would not turn away from helping them now, especially since the invasion was a result of his own mistake.
Now, thousands of exoskeletons exited their ship and attached themselves to any animal capable of sustaining them. They used their hosts against Cort’s fighters. Marines, Jaifan, and Human alike, who knew breaking them apart would only add to the problem, used incendiary rounds to incinerate the beings, along with their native hosts. Near the shafts that took the planet’s occupants to and from the surface farms, sentries with orders to stun anyone who emerged to work the land, protected the Threm living below the surface.
Cort reviewed a holographic image of the planet with Rai. Cort’s frustration over what he thought was a large weather front approaching them, turned to despair when he realized that the cloud-like patches were really throngs of exos controlling large areas of the planet. There were now millions of exoskeletons, of all sizes, while Cort had less than five hundred fighters, including minimally trained new recruits. And minimally was a generous description of their abilities. At least they can fire a MAT. Still, how long is this going to take? And I’m missing something. Something important. What the hell is it?
“Father, I detect an incoming shuttle.”
“What? George, you control the shuttles. Who’s in… Dammit. Send her down to me.” Cort knew Kim was going to be in a sour mood considering how he’d forced her away. He hoped she wasn’t in armor. Then he remembered that she was skilled with a CONDOR. “Godsdammit. She’s going to kick my… Wait! Is she wearing armor George?”
Kim was, and Cort knew she would fight beside his Marines, but with so many exos, it was a fight that could take years. Pushing ever-present thoughts of Diane out of his mind, he issued new orders to George. The gel core counterpart of George’s avatar printed and controlled more combat drones, while the humanoid avatar took control of the Remington. More Marines redeployed around the elevators, protecting the subterranean dwellers from the exoskeletons, while George’s two a
spects began the laborious task of exterminating the enemy from the planet’s surface.
“Put me through to your mother.”
“Okay. Good luck, Father.”
“I’m gonna need it.”
Cort cut the channel to George, but before he could speak, Kim said, “What do you want?”
“Not the time, Kim. I need your help.”
“That’s why I’m here. You need fighters, and I can fight.”
“How many people did you bring with you?”
Other than George’s avatar and Ceram, Kim was alone, leaving Dalek and the Jaifans on Solitude. She also told him that George refused to contact the planetary core, or synchronize the avatar’s memory with it.