Hell Heart

by Robert E. Vardeman

  * * *

  Diego checked the seismic sensors to see if the Cyclops was waiting for reinforcements. But if anything was moving along the trail hacked through the jungle, Diego could not detect it.

  His radio crackled as Sergeant Baca accessed their private frequency. “I know I’m in command, sir,” she said, “but do you have any advice here? Should we outwait it?”

  “No, Sergeant,” Diego responded. “It might maintain its position for a week. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to wait that long for breakfast.”

  Diego switched to Captain Allen’s frequency. “You there, Allen?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get that Ares in motion and take out the Cyclops. It’s burrowed down only a couple of meters. Blow it out with the rail gun. Using the Lucifer this close to our soldiers might be too messy . . . for us.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  Diego heard the powered armor even before he felt the thud-thud-thud of the approaching Ares. He waited calmly, ready to fire the instant the Cyclops showed itself. The Ares’s rail-gun ingot would blow open even the Cyclops’s armor—and if it did not crack the thick skin, it would rattle the human brain inside into a stupor. Either way, a few well-placed grenades from his soldiers could then take it out.

  The Ares crashed through the thick undergrowth and burst onto the field, its rail gun humming and ready. A depleted-uranium ingot whined out of the Harbinger and sped toward the Cyclops.

  But the noise and vibrations had alerted the mutant, and anticipating the attack, it had begun wiggling away, using explosive rounds to cut a channel through the jungle floor ahead of it. A second ingot missed but did flush the Cyclops. It scuttled along like a crab, faster than any man even with its damaged leg. Captain Allen chased it down the path, firing as he went.

  And then everything happened at once.

  Allen finally scored a direct hit on the fleeing Cyclops, blowing it into a thousand pieces of flesh and steel. As he passed under a tall tree overhanging the path, a greenish mist sprayed down from its branches, coating the bright armor of his suit. At the same moment a sudden screaming high in the dawn-lit sky pierced Diego’s brain like a hot needle. Clearly the Cyclops was not José’s only weapon. Once again, it looked like Diego had miscalculated his brother’s strategy.

  “Take cover!” he shouted, unable to hear his own voice. “Incoming!”

  Then the impact came. The ground rose under his feet and threw him ten meters through the air. He slammed into the trunk of a tree and crashed to the ground as the shock wave slashed through the jungle, stripping towering trees of leaves and bushes of small branches and passing over him like a hurricane.

  But Diego Villalobos was not aware of it. He was already unconscious.

  6

  * * *

  For long minutes after it came to rest, the Shard simply lay, stunned, at the bottom of the long, narrow tunnel it had cut through the dense vegetation overhead. Shard did not feel pain in the same way as their biological inferiors, but injuries to its crystalline shell transmitted themselves as a sense of wrongness. The Shard remained prone as it scanned for fractures and other dislocation damage to its crystal lattice. It found internal cracks along shear planes it had not known it possessed, but nothing that could stop it from achieving its goal.

  The alien knew it had a limited time before the natives of this world came to investigate the explosion of the mote’s landing, but it calculated it could remain a while longer in the shallow trench its landing had carved in the earth. The speed of its descent through the planet’s atmosphere, unprotected by the tough shell of its ship, had raised its body temperature higher than it had ever experienced, and although the Shard knew its shell was in no danger of fracturing, it needed a few moments to recover from the stress of its landing.

  And from the shock of having its ship destroyed. The battle station orbiting this murky planet had fired primitive energy weapons that had been easily nullified. It had not expected a missile attack to follow and crack the structure of its vessel.

  The Shard’s body had survived, but its ship was vaporized, blasted into meteoritic dust cascading downward to the planet. The piezoelectric currents the Shard used to command its ship would never again produce the familiar, instantaneous obedience it was accustomed to.

  Slowly, the Shard had reasserted order, one lattice plane at a time, until it was once more in control—as much as it could be—of its body. With command reestablished, the Shard focused all its attention on the planet whose gravity well had captured the bit of Maw-stuff. It slipped into the soupy atmosphere. The mote had come in fast and hard, and the ionization trail it had left in the air was clear to the Shard’s visual sensors.

  The Shard’s ability to control its descent was not as finely tuned as its ship’s had been, but it was capable of some maneuvering. It had extended its arms and legs, using them as lifting surfaces to skim through the thick atmosphere. It felt its body exterior warming, from cherry to yellow to blue to white-hot, but it ignored the risks, totally absorbed in following the energetic piece of the Maelstrom down to its projected landing place—a narrow neck between two larger landmasses.

  The mote’s impact with the earth had sent out a shock wave that the Shard could see from its vantage point still high in the air. The explosion expanded in a circle, flattening vegetation and raising a huge cloud of dust as the mote buried itself in the ground. Then the Shard had to turn its attention to its own landing, struggling to come to rest as close to the Maw-stuff as it could.

  And it had. The Shard finally levered its body upright, moving with only a trace of its usual grace and speed. Its shell was still cooling, and it moved with care to prevent any of the stress fractures lacing its body from growing large enough to cause a problem. It could already feel the crystalline lattices flowing and knitting together, morphing the structure of its body to repair the damage.

  The Shard climbed easily out of its landing crater, using its razor-sharp arms to punch handholds in the earthen walls. Once it was on the surface, it scanned its surroundings briefly to orient itself. The world it had landed on was absolutely teeming with life: the plants that towered over it, the small forms that scurried and flew and hopped past it. But even the unrelenting swirl of movement could not disguise the immense pulsations of energy coming from the crater just a few kilometers away. The Shard could not see the mote through the thick vegetation, but it did not need to; sensors on the surface of its shell could detect radiation across a broad spectrum.

  The Shard sped nimbly in the direction of the new pockmark on this world’s ugly face. In spite of its injuries, it lithely dodged around tangled undergrowth and thick-boled mahogany trees at more than thirty kilometers per hour, soon coming to an abrupt halt at the edge of a smoking, obsidian-glassy crater. The Maelstrom-stuff had come in so fast and so hot it had buried itself deep in the earth. All around the crater, for tens of meters in every direction, trees and undergrowth lay shredded on the ground. Here and there, the small bodies of animals lay tangled in the destroyed jungle growth.

  But the Shard ignored its surroundings, all its attention focused on the object dimly visible at the bottom of the crater. It moved with caution, unwilling to approach too closely until it could determine whether the radiation leaking from the mote posed a threat. The radiation seemed stronger there, which could be due to the fact that it was no longer being filtered through the thick skin of the Shard’s now-destroyed ship. At any rate, the incredible power of the Maelstrom-stuff seemed largely contained.

  Slowly, cautiously, the Shard lowered itself down the smooth walls of the crater until it stood on the bottom. It gingerly approached the smooth, glowing ball of energy that lay half-buried under a cascade of dirt. This close to the energy source, it could feel the radiation pulsing through its body, but it judged that the damage sustained would be minimal enough that it could convey the globe away from its landing place. Perhaps the Pharon ship had been destroyed—but perhaps it
had not. At any moment, the Shard’s mortal enemy could come seeking to reclaim its prize. There would be time enough to plan an escape from this backwater world after it had retrieved the mote.

  The Shard bent with liquid grace and brushed the dirt away from the glowing globe. It worked the spikes of its hands into the earth under the mote and strained to leverage it out of the grave it had dug for itself. Slowly, as if reluctant to leave its prison, the globe came out of the ground.

  And as it did, the Shard heard a cracking noise, and knew it had miscalculated horribly.

  From the top of the globe, from a hairline crack that had been too small to detect, shot a beam of pure, intense white light—a beam that shone directly into the Shard’s inhuman face.

  Overwhelmed by the surge of raw energy it could feel pouring into its body, the Shard dropped its prize. When the globe hit the ground, the crack widened even farther, saturating the Shard’s body with radiation. Instinctively, the Shard threw its arms over its face, trying vainly to shield itself from the waves of energy battering its shell. A strange, mewing sound came from its throat.

  And then the Shard began to change.

  * * *

  Consuela Ortega lay unmoving behind a fallen tree. The screaming from above had been worse than a stricken angel’s death cry, and the explosion that followed had briefly plunged her into darkness. She sat up, her head throbbing, and pushed her thick black hair away from her eyes. She waited a few seconds for the world to stop spinning, then began to take stock of her injuries.

  Her head ached, but she didn’t think she had suffered a concussion, and when she touched her forehead, her fingertips came away unstained by blood. She was covered with cuts and bruises, but none of them was serious.

  But when she levered herself to her feet, she let out a gasp and sank down again. Her left ankle had flared with agony as soon as she put any weight on it, and she could see that it was swelling rapidly. She didn’t think any bones were broken, but it was, at the least, a severe sprain.

  Some, finding themselves alone and crippled in the depths of the jungle, would be afraid. Consuela Ortega wasn’t one of them. She was a soldier, a soldier in the fight for liberation. She had seen injuries much worse than this—some of them her own.

  Working as quickly as she could, she ripped fabric from the bottom of her coarse cotton shirt and tied the rags as tightly as she could stand around her ankle, hissing through her teeth at the pain. When finished, she made another attempt to stand, bracing herself on the trunk of the fallen tree, and gingerly tested her weight on the injured leg. This time, the ankle held—painfully, but she could walk.

  That was all that mattered. She did not know the source of the explosion that had injured her, but she knew she had to get back to José and make her report. The attack with the Cyclops had gone better than she had dared to hope, and the other weapon—the one José trusted only her to handle—had deployed perfectly. José would need the information she carried to finish planning his attack—assuming he had survived.

  Slowly, carefully, using her Kalashnikov rifle for support, Consuela made her way through the jungle, away from the Union patrol. She doubted they would come after her even if any of them could make it through the green mist that had sprayed from the Neo-Soviet cylinder she had hidden in the tree before the battle.

  She was tired and in pain, but she was used to that. She was not used to how slow her progress through the jungle was. She had been making her way toward the rendezvous point, cutting north and east to avoid the Union troops, for three hours before the pain in her leg finally forced her to rest. She lowered herself carefully to the ground and blew out a breath in frustration. At this rate, it would take her forever to make her way back to the others.

  Despite her injuries, despite her concern abut rejoining José, curiosity got the better of her as she took a deep sniff of the air and found strange odors mingling with the more usual ones she had known all her life. José had to know of the Cyclops’s success, and he must also know what had caused the sonic blast and aerial explosion that had injured her. Had the Union countered the Neo-Sov terror weapon with one of its own?

  The stench of burned plants gave her a clue as to the location of the blast. When she spotted scorched leaves in the jungle canopy high over her head, she deviated from her trek to the arranged rendezvous and instead went due east, toward the evidence of destruction.

  Consuela limped down the path, holding the Kalashnikov in her right hand rather than using it for support. If it was a Union weapon responsible for her injuries, she might have to defend herself against the soldiers who had deployed it.

  Consuela was short at a bare 158 centimeters, but she was sturdy and carried her fifty-five kilos like a dancer. Even hobbled by her ankle, she moved gracefully through the jungle, her dark eyes missing nothing. Here and there she saw increasingly singed vegetation, giving her a road map more precise than a GPS. Her nose wrinkled at the pungent, charred odors from blackened vines dangling high up in the towering jacaranda trees.

  Consuela’s progress slowed even further as she came to the edge of a clearing in the jungle—a clearing that had not been there before. The destruction stretched for meters in every direction, the flattened trees and bushes pointing like blackened arrows away from the pit in the center of the blasted field. She looked up and saw where the missile—or bomb or ag plane—had come down, searing the vegetation as it crashed into her jungle. The absence of a secondary explosion made her even warier. She had once found an unexploded Union missile burrowed into the ground. José had dropped a grenade into the hole to set it off and had barely escaped with his life, but the risk had been necessary. What if a curious village child had accidentally detonated it instead? She could hear faint noises coming from the pit—Union personnel, examining the aftereffects of their weapon?

  Somehow, she did not think so. Whatever had caused this destruction, it felt alien, beyond the scope of anything she had seen in her years of fighting the Union oppressors. Cautiously, her rifle at the ready, she approached the pit. Lowering herself to her belly, she crawled to the edge of the blackened crater and raised her head just enough to see to the bottom.

  She fell back immediately, blinded by the intense white light blasting from the bottom of the pit. Her eyes watering, she could think of only one thing: radiation. Consuela rolled to her side and fumbled at her vest strap, pulling around a dosimeter. Blinking fiercely, she peered through its microscope-like end, fearing what she would see. If she had been exposed to a lethal amount of gamma radiation, the indicator would have spiked into to the red zone. But it remained in the yellow, where it had been for months after she had blown up a Union convoy carrying uranium fuel pellets to the CANDU reactor in Revancha.

  For the moment, she was safe, but she had no desire to remain in the crater’s vicinity any longer than necessary. She had to gather as much data as she could for José. Was this some new threat to her land? Even the campesinos in the depths of the jungle had learned of the dangers of radiation poisoning in the years of nuclear war that had followed the Earth’s capture by this strange space in which they struggled to survive.

  Her mind retained only confused impressions from her split-second glimpse over the edge of the pit: a single figure, pitch-black against the blinding glare. Some kind of struggle was going on at the bottom of this wound in the earth, but it was something she had never encountered before. She slowly scrabbled backward from the edge and made her way cautiously around the crater, hoping to find a better vantage point. The ground had turned to glass-slick slag, and any miscalculation would send her plunging downward. The crater walls were too steep for her to have a prayer of escape on her own—assuming the radiation didn’t kill her immediately.

  Whatever was in the pit made the noise she had heard before—a faint mewing sound, but with a harsh undertone that scraped at her nerves and set her teeth on edge. And this time it was accompanied by another noise: a kind of wet sizzling that sounded as if blobs of mo
lten glass were falling to the earth just below her feet.

  At the far side of the crater she stopped and fished silently in the pouch at her belt. What she thought she had remembered was there: a pair of full-spectrum binoculars she had liberated from a Union soldier several days before. He would not be needing them again. Holding them up to her eyes, she adjusted them to filter out the maximum amount of light and once again peered over the edge.

  What she saw was something entirely outside her experience, something she instinctively recognized as alien. At the bottom of the crater, still bright enough to bring tears to her eyes despite the heavy filtering of the binoculars, was a round, glowing globe, small enough for a man to lift. From the top of the globe shot a beam of light—and bathed in that light was a figure. Consuela did not know what it had originally looked like, but she could tell that what she was seeing now was unnatural.

  From the crystalline figure dripped globules of what looked like liquid glass. As they touched the ground, the tendrils connecting them to their parent broke away, and they wriggled toward the walls of the pit with a horrible purpose. There were only a few now visible, but from every part of the creature, new glassy tumors were bulging from all over the smooth crystal surface of the creature.

  The monster at the bottom of the pit looked like a malformed ice sculpture as it staggered away from the light source, still making that strange mewing sound. But now the sound was quietly echoed by the monster’s unnatural children. The creature’s movements grew even wilder and more uncontrolled. It lost its footing and crashed heavily to the ground, a crystalline cancer grown out of control.