by B. V. Larson
“No doubt they will. In fact, I’m counting on it. I’ve got a plan this time, you see. It’s so crazy, you might have come up with it.”
“You’re using one of my plans?”
He gave me a grin, but I didn’t feel cheered up. Not one bit.
-49-
Less than an hour later, I found myself in an unfortunate position: upside down and ass-backwards inside a drop-pod chute. The tubes all around me were occupied by my most loyal regulars and some other good folks, too.
Now, if you’re anything like me, you might be wondering what the hell I was doing inside a deployment device built to fire a man down from orbit onto a planetary body. And if you did think that, I’d be first to congratulate you on pinpointing the logical fallacy in my current predicament.
In fact, I’d pointed out this flaw to any number of disinterested persons ever since I’d heard of Drusus’ brilliant scheme.
Sure, it was true that we were inside a ship that was so big it was like a small planet—but there were limits. Once you exceeded those limits, in any chosen direction, a man in a drop-pod would be just so much spam in a can to that harder-than-stone outer hull.
Wriggling a bit, I shifted inside my tiny, tomb-like pod and waited for the action to begin outside.
The only method I had of witnessing events was through my tapper, which had been connected up to a screen in front of my nose. That screen displayed numbers, mostly. Pressure readings, troop readiness levels, all kinds of crap like that.
I didn’t care about any of it. I just kept straining my fingers and my eyes, panning around the camera view to see if the enemy Skay-critters had arrived yet.
Strangely, they seemed to be taking their time. At last, Drusus lost his patience and decided to make the first move.
A full cohort marched out of the ass-end of Legate. That was a first to my knowledge. The ship was built so it could land on a dockyard asteroid or even a planet, but that wasn’t its usual mode of operation.
The cohort was full of light troops. Almost all of them were unarmored. Only the officers and weaponeers had been issued a powersuit to wear.
Drusus had a sense of humor, I saw—or maybe it was just pride. Every unit was marching in formation, with a red and gold Varus banner overhead. Due to the thin atmosphere inside the big ship, the banners didn’t flutter, they sort of drooped—but they were glorious to behold all the same.
Each pennant was carried by the senior noncom in every unit. They all bore the wolfshead of Legion Varus, along with a unit number.
The cohort reached the open deck and spread out, looking warily for attackers—but there weren’t any. Not yet, anyway.
Each unit formed a square and placed itself in position around the ship. I had to smile, they were bait, and they probably knew it.
About five full minutes passed. The enemy didn’t do a damned thing. Apparently, we hadn’t triggered them yet.
Finally, my radio crackled.
“This isn’t working, McGill,” Drusus said. “How did you piss off the enemy and get them to attack last time?”
“Well sir, we shot up some stuff. That got their attention.”
“All right…”
The channel went dead. I was surprised Drusus had called me at all. He must be feeling nervous.
I saw motion on my tiny screen then—a turret was swiveling.
A stream of shells fired. A rippling series of cracking sounds reached me, even buried inside the ship, carried by the thin air and the hull.
Trying to follow the trajectory of the shot, I saw it was headed up toward a protruding nodule of metal and glass far and away above us. It looked like the super-structure of a ship—perhaps it was.
The nodule was destroyed. The turret swiveled and fired again.
This went on for maybe two minutes—then something happened.
An army of… things boiled up out of the hull. It was weird to watch. The thick hull of the ship was rounded like the inside of a cannonball. It was so dense that we stuck to that surface, tugged toward its mass with something like the gravitation force of the moon.
The whole ship was a big round hollow thing, and we had landed Legate on the inside wall of this sphere. The troops surrounding the ship looked like ants crawling on the side of an empty bottle.
The aliens were now boiling up all over the place, surrounding the ship. The gun turrets swiveled, aiming at the growing, approaching horde. They hammered out shells and beams. The ranks wilted—but thousands more rushed closer.
The hapless troops surrounding our ship were joined by a second cohort—then a third. Graves was deploying them now, before all was lost.
It looked hopeless to me, but I still wished I was out there on the front line, fighting with the rest of my legion.
“McGill,” Graves said in my ear. “We’re sending your squad off now. Bend your knees.”
I barely had time to fold my legs a fraction before the capsule was shot out of Legate. Usually, drop-pods fired downward out of the ship’s belly. But this version of Red Deck was different, it could aim in a variety of angles.
The sensation was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. I could see the ship disappearing behind me, and up ahead there was a gloomy, misty darkness. The atmosphere inside the great ship was thin, but it wasn’t clean. It was sooty and full of floating particles. These formed burning streaks around me as my pod hurtled through them.
How far did I go? A thousand kilometers? Something like that.
But finally, the pod began to arc downward again. It was falling, toward the curved wall of the ship.
Even that, though, might be a false impression. An illusion. When you were inside a sphere, and you shot at an angle across it, the curving interior wall soon came back at you again. It appeared, in fact, as if I was slanting down into the ground.
The pod flipped, and the retros fired, ramming against my boots. I was coming in for a harsh landing—but where?
There was no escape, no exit from this artificial world. The single great door we knew of had closed.
Trapped and desperate, I was going God-knows-where to battle God-knows-what.
-50-
When I plunged into something solid again, I blacked out for a moment—or maybe a minute.
“Sir? Centurion McGill?” asked a youngish voice. He sounded like a recruit.
Someone was shaking me. I groaned awake.
“He’s alive!”
“Get him out of that pod,” someone more familiar said. “Form a perimeter. Chop-chop!”
That last voice… it was Leeson. Someone had handed him a pitchfork and invited him to Hell with me.
I was hauled to my feet, but I stumbled. Putting a gauntlet on the steaming wreck that had been my pod, I steadied myself. My drooping eyes examined the pod briefly. It looked like someone had bent it over and done wrong-minded things to it.
“Damn,” I said, “it’s a good thing they build these things tough.”
“They build Varus troops tough too, sir,” Leeson said. “Can you walk? Are you with us, man?”
“I am.”
“Good—then you’re back in command.”
With a painful effort, I straightened and looked around. I had an awful crick in my neck. A blinking red medical light indicated I had a cracked vertebra.
There wasn’t much I could do about that right now, so I thumbed off the warning light on my tapper. It would only freak out the rest of the squad.
“What’s our situation?” I asked Leeson.
“We lost three on landing. Two are walking-wounded, like you.”
“I’m good. Take me off your list.”
Leeson shrugged and tapped at his arm. “Okay. You’re fit as a fiddle now.”
“Where the hell are we?” I asked, looking around at our LZ curiously.
It wasn’t what I’d been expecting. I’d envisioned an industrial location—but this looked more like a crystalline bug-hive. There was slimy stuff, frozen-looking resins e
verywhere. Clinging strands of liquid flowed like wax from above.
“We crashed into some kind of a wasp’s nest,” Leeson told me. “At least, that’s the best I can figure out. Who knows why ops thought this garden-spot was perfect for a commando mission, but here we are.”
“Right…” I said, checking my gear. My armor and weapons were all in better shape than I was. “Send Cooper up to scout on the roof. The rest of you, fan out and search the hive.”
Cooper grumbled, but he crawled up the wall and onto the roof like a fly. That trick was easily done in the low gravity. Then he went into stealth mode and vanished as he slipped out of a hole one of our pods had made while punching down into this odd organic structure.
“Report!” I urged all the scouts.
“Nothing up here,” Cooper said. “Just a few of those buzzing things, but they’re pretty far off.”
“How far?”
“Uh… the lidar says two kilometers.”
The rest reported in as well. It appeared we’d landed in a nest made for flying creatures, the type we’d encountered when we’d first invaded this ship.
I summoned them all back to the central chamber, and we huddled up.
“All right,” I said, “we could wreck this place, but I don’t think anyone would care. There must be thousands of these nests inside this huge ship.”
“Maybe this really isn’t a ship,” Cooper said. “I mean… maybe it’s more like a world.”
“Clarify that, and quickly,” I told him.
“That’s the feeling I get, sir. These creatures live here—but they don’t serve like a crew. They waited until Legate fired shells to come against us. I mean, it is a ship, but it’s also an inside-out planet. A place where things live. They might not even know they’re inside a ship at all.”
I thought that over. It was a weird idea, but it did fit the facts. This ship… this world… was capable of sustaining life inside it, and was so vast it wasn’t organized in a strict hierarchy. It was more like an island that could travel independently through space.
“But there must be a crew, a captain,” Leeson insisted. “Somebody controls that door, the force beams that dragged us in here, and the weapons outside.”
“You’re both right,” I said. “This place functions as both a ship and a habitat. That makes things easier in a way. They don’t have a crew of millions to hunt us down. They have hives and colonies, maybe. What we have to do is find the bridge, where they control the flight capacities and the weapons.”
“None of that is here in this place,” Cooper pointed out.
“No…” I said, standing. “Cooper, come with me. We’re going out onto the roof.”
“I told you, there’s nothing—”
“Cooper!”
I was already climbing up to the holes in the ceiling, using my hands to pull myself up off the ground. It was harder in armor, but not impossible. It was kind of like doing a chin-up with someone pushing on your feet. The low gravity really helped.
“Sir, yes sir!” Cooper shouted, scuttling after me.
When we got to the roof, I had him throw a fold of his stealth suit over me. It hadn’t really worked back on Earth, but I figured it couldn’t hurt. We both looked out at the inside of this strange new World from behind the woven veil that hid us.
“It’s different…” I said. “The inside of the hull looks more like natural ground out here. There are plants, even. There’s a glow coming from somewhere, too.”
“No plants without a light source,” Cooper agreed. “I haven’t been able to pinpoint an artificial sun or anything like that. I think the light is ambient—like maybe the hull glows in patches. I don’t know.”
“That is interesting… What else have you noticed, scout?”
“Well, I think the area around the big door that leads to space is kind of a dead zone,” Cooper said. “When they open that thing up, it lets in cold and sucks out some air. Even with a force field in place to prevent that loss of gasses, it must happen.”
“Right, we’re farther inland now, away from that single entrance. That must be like a dead-zone for the native creatures.”
I couldn’t believe I was thinking of all the strange monsters we’d encountered as inhabitants of this ‘world’ but that’s the way I now saw it.
Using my helmet optics, I finally spotted something interesting. It was pretty far off, but it was the only target I could see that might be worth investigating.
“You see that thing? That tower, or mound, or whatever it is?”
“Sure do, it must be about as high as Mt. Everest.”
He was right. In fact, I thought I saw frost on its upper regions. Like everything in this world, it was strangely shaped. It appeared to be partially organic and partially manufactured.
“Well, it’s the biggest structure in sight. Maybe it’s a lighthouse, or a latrine-making factory. It doesn’t really matter because it’s the only lead we’ve got. We’re going there.”
“Roger that,” Cooper sighed. “Cooper in ghost mode, moving out.”
The stealth suit swept away from me, and Cooper ran off. He was in stealth mode, but I could still follow the impressions his boots were making in the papery surface of the hive for his first dozen steps. After that, I lost him. I hoped the aliens here couldn’t see through his little trick as easily as they had back on Earth. I guessed we’d find out soon enough.
“Squad! Saddle up!” I called down to them.
“Where are we going?” Leeson demanded.
“I see a nice diner down on the main floor. It’s only about twenty kilometers away. Let’s get going!”
Taking the lead—except for the invisible Cooper—I marched out into the open. Every few seconds, I cast a glance over my shoulder, which gave me a sharp pain in the neck.
But I couldn’t help it. I was looking out for those flapping things, hoping they weren’t done with Legate and now searching for any escaped morsels like us.
-51-
We marched for hours. Now and then, we ran into some freak or another. Often, they ignored us. Once in a while, they took notice and attacked. We responded appropriately when necessary and blasted them down quickly.
“It’s like we’re on the Serengeti Plains,” Leeson said. “There’s some kind of freaky water-buffalo every hundred meters.”
“At least they all seem surprised,” I said. “As long as we keep moving, they don’t seem to be gathering up against us.”
“Hey, Centurion,” Carlos called, trotting to move up the line and catch me. “Seems like we’ve been on this pointless deep-patrol long enough, doesn’t it?”
Leeson and I glanced at him.
“What did you have in mind, Specialist?” Leeson asked. He’d never liked how I let Carlos talk to me on an equal footing. “Do you have some important advice to give our centurion about leadership?”
Discretion actually seemed to penetrate his thick, smart-assed skull, and Carlos changed his expression. “Take it easy, sir.” Falling into step behind us, he lowered his voice a little.
“Hey, let’s get real, shall we? We have killed more than a few creatures.”
“That’s ‘cause we were fired into some empty wasps’ nest!” Leeson insisted.
“Exactly. Not our fault—but regardless, we’re good and screwed. Legate is probably scrap metal by now, and the rest of the legion is being run through sausage-grinders to power one of these walking rickshaws.”
Leeson frowned fiercely, but he didn’t order Carlos to shut up—probably because I was there.
“Have you got a constructive suggestion, Specialist?” I asked.
“Only that we should call in—to find out what happened.”
I stopped marching and stared at him.
“These things hear radio signals,” I said. “You got that after the first time we went around, right? They’ll come humping over here and take us out.”
“Maybe. Or maybe Graves is holding them off. If he is, we can try
to go back. If he’s dead and gone, we’re screwed anyway. We’re just prolonging the inevitable.”
“I like prolonging the inevitable,” I told him, “especially when the inevitable is a heinous death.”
“Look—” Carlos said. “I don’t want to be shredded down to meat and stuffed into some monster’s jock strap any more than the next guy.”
Leeson released a dirty laugh. “You sure about that, boy?”
Carlos ignored him. “My point is,” he said, “we’re never going to capture some distant mountain that’s about as tall as Mons Olympus. We’re just not.”
I didn’t like what I hearing. It was defeatist talk. But I couldn’t help thinking Carlos had a strong argument. If we called in now, we’d either get rescued, or we would have a new goal—or we’d die quick.
After thinking it over for a few minutes, I shook my head. “We’re marching. Keep up and don’t prattle so much.”
Dejected, Carlos retreated and marched with the single-file patrol again.
We continued for several hours. We had plenty of power, air and water, because we could leach and recycle most of that stuff from our environment—but we didn’t have limitless food. That would be the thing that got us in the end. Unless we wanted to try to eat the muscle fibers out of one of these abominations, we would eventually starve.
Stopping for a rest, I got an idea. I took it to Kivi and discussed it, as she was our tech.
“Yeah,” she said. “I can do it. Let me work on scripting a buzzer.”
After our rest, we continued on. There was no night or day inside Armor World, so we just took rests and ate when we felt like it.
The landscape was bleak, but increasingly natural-looking. It was like crossing a desert. There were some spiny, dry plants, rocks and bones—lots of bones. Over time, we came to realize that the animal parts of these aliens died and were left to rot, fueling the rest of the eco-system, such as it was.
“Ew,” Carlos complained. “We’re walking on dirt that’s really just rotted meat and shit ground down to dust.”