by B. V. Larson
“Toro!” I called. “What’s your status?”
There was nothing. Just dead air.
“Toro? Do you read me?”
Nothing.
“Harris, fan out,” I said, switching back to our tactical channel. “Leeson, take the center. Everyone advance with caution.”
Jubilation had quickly transformed into fear. We had no idea what we were walking into.
“She’s probably stepped out on us,” Carlos said. “The second the mission timer was up, I bet she ran for it.”
“Could be,” I admitted, but I somehow didn’t think that was the case.
Harris reached the open area where we’d set up the gateway first. “looks bad,” he reported. “I see bodies—they destroyed the gateway, sir. We’re cut off.”
“Who did?”
“No enemy causalities. Whatever hit Toro took her out without a loss—either that, or they carry their dead away with them, too.”
“Do a body count,” I ordered. “Is Toro among them?”
“Yeah… you better come take a look, sir.”
Cautiously, I moved up to where Harris was. The scene was grim. About half of Toro’s platoon was there, dead. They’d been in a firefight—that much was obvious.
“Where are the enemy?” I demanded.
Floramel was kneeling to examine the broken gateway poles. “These poles were deliberately destroyed.”
“And Toro is right here—her demolition pack is gone.”
Her body had taken hard damage. A leg had been torn clean off, despite her armor.
“Floramel, Kivi, what happened here?”
Kivi looked the scene over while the rest of the troops formed a paranoid circle.
“Heavy prints—they scratched neutronium deck-plates,” Floramel said.
“Galactic automatons,” Kivi said, looking it over. “That’s what I think this was.”
“Where did they go?” I demanded.
“There’s only one answer to that,” Leeson said, squatting next to us. “They passed through the poles and invaded our ship. It was a two-way street, after all.”
I nodded, getting it at last.
“And Toro managed to blast the poles to stop them—or at least to break the link. Do you think all of them got through? How many are we talking about?”
Kivi shrugged. “It’s a big hold. There could be any number of them in here with us right now.”
I stared at her in shock. “They’re here? In packing crates or something?”
“They were,” she said. “But we activated them—or the Nairbs did from the bridge.”
Looking around with new alarm, I began to shout orders. Everything had changed. Our mission had been successful, but it was supposed to be only a first step in putting down the enemy ship. Instead of having the Nairb ship at our mercy, all we’d done was warn her and get our own vessel invaded.
I had to wonder what Graves and Deech were saying about me back on Nostrum right now.
-52-
The Nairbs hadn’t put surveillance equipment in their hold because the hold was capable of taking care of itself. We found the broken crates, about a hundred meters from where we’d first landed. We hadn’t seen them because they’d been placed in the hold in the opposite direction of our goal. As they weren’t in our pathway when we stormed toward the deep-link module, we’d never noticed them.
“Whatever they were,” Carlos said, whistling as he looked over the damage, “they were big.”
“What makes you think they’re all gone, Ortiz?” Harris demanded, poking through the wreckage.
“If there are more,” Carlos said coolly, “they’re not in this stack. They would have to be somewhere else. Makes sense the mass of them were right here in the center of the hold.”
I didn’t comment as I was too busy examining the evidence firsthand. The crates were weird-looking. They weren’t box-shaped, or even cylindrical. They were polyhedrons. They had twelve sides, and they were about five meters tall. Blasted open from the inside, they resembled high-tech eggs that had hatched.
“What are they made of?” I asked Natasha as she pawed at the nearest of them.
She was running chunks of the crumbling foam-like material into an analyzer’s input port as I watched. She examined the results and looked up at me.
“It’s organic,” she said, “but artificially grown.”
“Eggs?” I asked. “They look like eggs, but on a grand scale and with the wrong shape.”
“Right... Whatever laid these wasn’t some kind of bird. It was an artificial life form—if it’s really alive at all.”
“Hey!” shouted Harris from a dozen meters off. “Hey, come look at this. Ortiz, I want you to suck on these prints and give me an apology!”
We moved over to where he stood and examined the floor he was pointing at. The scarred up deck in this spot showed a line of wreckage away from the center of the hold. It wasn’t as large a region as that which led toward Toro’s last stand, but it was undeniable.
Natasha rushed to the scene at my side. “I was expecting this,” she said.
“You were?”
“I never bought your theory that Toro had destroyed the gateway poles. I think these guardians did it—which means some of them are still here.”
“Oh…” I said, feeling dumb for not thinking of that.
“One…” Natasha said, squatting over the bizarre prints and counting them. “Two… Three? My best guess is that three of them went deeper into the hold instead of attacking our troops.”
“But why do that?” Carlos asked. “Their chances were better hitting invaders all at once… Unless…”
“Unless what?” Harris demanded.
“Unless there are more crates, and some of them went off to release the others?”
We all looked alarmed.
“Natasha,” I demanded, “how far does your stealth jammer system work?”
“Maybe five hundred meters. No more than that.”
“They might be outside that region. Maybe they tried to communicate with the bridge, and couldn’t. Some might have moved off to do that.”
“Either way, Centurion,” Leeson said. “We can’t let them perform their mission.”
“Right,” I said, “we have to go after them.”
Moving forward, an arm reached out and hooked mine. It was Leeson’s gauntlet that gripped me.
“Sir,” he said. “You’re the only one with a teleport suit. No one else can go back to Nostrum and get another gateway set up. Without reinforcements…”
“You’re right,” I said, peeling off the suit. “Kivi, you put this on.”
“Okay,” she said quickly, seeing her chance to escape the hold.
She got into the outfit, set the coordinates, and powered up. Soon, her outline wavered, blue-shifted—then she was gone.
“Why’d you send her?” Carlos asked me.
“Because we need fighters here, not an extra tech. She knows how to run one of those suits better than you do—and we have Natasha in case we need something figured out.”
He didn’t argue, but he didn’t look totally happy. Kivi and Carlos had had a long term thing going, and he always suspected me of putting a move on her. At times, he’d been right, but today I just wanted to complete our mission.
“Harris, have your people armor up with functional breastplates and try to give them all plasma weapons instead of those snap-rifles.”
He did so, shouting and kicking rumps when they didn’t move fast enough. The light troopers weren’t fully rated on plasma weapons, but they were going to get a crash course today.
As there was nothing functional left to guard at the center of the hold, I ordered my entire force to advance along the trail of wreckage. Whatever these hatchlings were doing, it couldn’t be to our benefit, and we had to stop them.
About two hundred steps later, we found something new. Three more torn open cartons, eggs or whatever we were dealing with.
“Six of them now,” Ca
rlos said. “Long odds.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “We’ll take them out. Sargon, your people are our best shot. Go for tight, focused beams—using multiple cannons on each target. Just in case they’re as tough as I think they are.”
“I’m on it, sir,” the veteran said.
He’d spent most of his years in Legion as a weaponeer, but he’d recently moved up to veteran in rank. In this situation, he was perfect to lead the hunt. I had the feeling we were going to need all the firepower we could muster to deal with this threat.
Advancing with increased caution as we got closer to the wall of the hold, we were all on edge. Each slight sound made the troops jump—including myself.
But when the attack finally did come, it was from an unexpected direction.
When we’d first located the evidence of the things from the eggs, we’d seen the deck plates scratched and damaged. I’d figured the enemy were of such weight and possibly made of metal, that they’d dented floor the way one might scratch a surface by dragging heavy furniture over it.
But that wasn’t it at all. What happened to us must have happened to Toro’s crew—the enemy dropped down into our midst from the ceiling.
Leeson, God love him, was the first to die. Something huge and dark with claws like the Devil himself fell from the roof and landed right on him, squashing him like a bug. He didn’t even get a shot off, or scream, or nothing.
The monster was flesh, but not all flesh. It had metal boots with claws—or maybe that was just how the feet looked, it was hard to tell. Standing in a crouch, its fleshy body was mottled and lumpy, like an alligator or a stone-carved gargoyle come to life. A mouth opened, showing a pink interior, and it made an awful, low, rumbling sound.
My men didn’t need any special orders after that first half-second of shock passed. They craned their necks to look up, rifles lifted—and sure enough the ceiling was crawling with these monstrosities. They began dropping all over the place.
Plasma bolts and laser carbines—even a few snap-rifles began to fire. No one was holding back. They were all on full auto, panicky and falling back in disarray in every direction.
“Concentrated fire!” I heard Harris roar. “Mark my target and take one down at a time!”
Sargon’s group was near the monster that had flattened Leeson, and they lashed it with powerful beams. Surprisingly, it didn’t go down right away. It smoked and lashed out with those black, crusty-looking limbs. Metallic claws on its feet swept a trooper up and pulled him close in a hug. The head dipped and came back up—the soldier’s helmet crunching in those powerful jaws.
“The damned thing ripped Carlson’s head off!” Sargon shouted. “Burn it down!”
The startled weaponeers finally got their act together and lanced it until it fell in a smoking heap.
The key strength of human weaponry has always been keeping the enemy at a distance and firing lots of lethal stuff at them in an organized fashion. This foe, however, had messed that all up. They were right in our midst, and it was hard to concentrate fire without hitting each other.
“Sargon,” I shouted, “hit the ones on the roof. Half of them are still up there.”
Three were down now, and three were on the ceiling. Sargon relayed my orders, marked his target on every weaponeer’s HUD and one by one, the three on the ceiling were destroyed.
We still had two left in our midst, however, and they’d been busy. They’d each bitten large chunks of meat off a couple of troopers, while simply smashing down and walking over others, crushing them
Blood and smoke were everywhere. I ran up behind one of the monsters, placing my carbine where the spine should be and holding the trigger down. That made a smoking hole but didn’t stop it. The thing didn’t seem to feel any pain—I pissed it off, all right, but I didn’t manage to stun it or get it to cower back.
Grabbing one of my sad-sack light troopers, it lifted her up and that maw opened wide. Everyone knew how this was going to end, and we winced, showing our teeth in sympathy.
The girl in question was screaming, but she didn’t die easily. She had on a breastplate from the fallen heavy troopers Toro had been leading. She pulled out something blue and glowy.
“Grenade!” I shouted, hurling myself backward.
Others nearby scrambled for cover when the gravity weapon vanished. The usual blue-white light came, but it was muted.
The creature lurched in shock. Finally, something had gotten the full attention of one of these nightmares. He keeled over stone dead.
The rest of us looked around, but there were no more targets. They were all down.
Harris and I approached the monster which still clamped tightly on the girl in those claws.
Harris began to smile, then to laugh. “She rammed that grenade right down into its belly!”
“Yeah,” I said. “Either that, or it snapped her arm off before she could let go of it.”
“Either way, sir, that was a win for us. We outdid Toro, alright. Just wait until I tell her. She lost at least twice as many regulars, and I didn’t see a single dead monster.”
I looked around at the carnage thoughtfully. “Maybe she got hit by a lot more of them. We counted about twenty broken eggs.”
“Yeah… maybe,” Harris admitted. “If twenty had hit us—we’d have been toast. What now, sir?”
That was a damned good question. I looked around at what was left of my unit, and I saw every tired, desperate eye meeting mine at once.
Sometimes, command wasn’t what it was cracked up to be.
-53-
To give myself a chance to think, I ordered everyone to patch up and cannibalize equipment from our dead. That took about five minutes, during which I desperately hoped I’d hear something from Legion Varus, or Kivi—or just about anyone.
It didn’t happen. There was no relief column, and our communications equipment wasn’t powerful enough to reach across a star system to talk to those still aboard Nostrum. I would have dearly loved a report from that direction, but it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.
“There are two options,” I told my tired, haggard-looking crew. “We can sit here at the LZ and wait for Kivi to return—hopefully with reinforcements, or we can break out of this hold and invade the ship.”
There were a lot of surprised faces looking at me now.
“Sir…” Harris said, “are you serious about that second idea? We’re getting our asses kicked in the hold. Why would invading the ship itself be any easier?”
“Legionnaires don’t look for easy paths, Adjunct,” I told him. “We look for effective ones. By now, the crew of this ship has to know we’re here. They have us bottled up, and they’re clearly not without effective defenses.”
“That’s my damned point, sir. I vote we stay put and wait for the cavalry.”
His position was typical of Harris, but it wasn’t unreasonable. We’d been pretty badly beat-up already. Not even Varus people relished violent death. My unit was at something like half-strength and morale was breaking.
“All right we’ll wait,” I said, to everyone’s relief. “But we’ll have to set up a defensive position someplace else. They probably have this place zeroed by now.”
That was an alarming thought, and it got them all up and moving again. No one wanted to see any more gargoyle things dropping from the ceiling. As it was, everyone kept looking up and peering over their shoulders into the dark.
Leading the way, I took them to a corner of the hold. There was no retreat from here, but we would be able to see an enemy approaching.
“Natasha,” I said, “set up your stealth network in a chain back to the LZ. When someone comes back, have a buzzer tell us.”
She went to work on that while Harris and I set up firing positions. As Toro’s group had wiped, and Leeson was gone, I was shorthanded for officers. I took Leeson’s platoon and Harris ran his light troopers around in circles. He had them all using plasma rifles like they knew what they were doing—but we both
knew they were very green.
For about half an hour, nothing really happened. Every minute that passed left us feeling more and more worried.
“What’s the hold up?” Harris demanded, haranguing Natasha for the tenth time. “Is Kivi taking a shower or something?”
“There’s no way of knowing what happened to her, Adjunct,” she told him.
“That’s great. That’s just great. We’re screwed. You should have gone yourself, McGill. Kivi probably got lost.”
I smiled at him. “I’ll take that as a rare vote of confidence, Harris. But you’re right, it’s been too long. We can’t sit here any—”
Right about then, we heard something. Something loud and deep. It was a massive clang of metal on metal.
Everyone stood up, looking around. Objects around us—light ones like cloth and paper, began to flutter and rise into the air.
We’d been in space for long enough to know what was happening.
“Faceplates closed!” I shouted. “Pressure readings, Natasha?”
“We’re down to seventy percent of one atmosphere and dropping,” she said.
“We’ve got a breach,” I said. “Most likely, it’s intentional.”
“The Nairbs are getting smart,” Harris said. “They’ve opened an airlock to vent the atmo into space.”
He was probably right, and we all knew it.
“We can still sit tight, can’t we Centurion?” A light trooper named Jenna asked me.
I shook my head. “No, probably not. They know we’re here. They’ll take action for certain now, and our relief troops are late. Time to get back into this battle, people. Shoulder your gear!”
As we marched toward the nearest exit, I thought about how grim our situation had become. We’d been an advanced force, a commando raid, really. But now we’d become the entire boarding party. The ship was being defended, clearly.
Things took an even worse turn once we reached the hatch. While we worked to open it, the air pressure went to zero in the hold. They’d opened an external hatch somewhere and let all the air out into space.
“Sir!” Natasha called out to me, her radio crackling. “Radiation levels are spiking!”