by Jamie Sawyer
“Going to have to find a bigger knife…” Novak muttered. His enormous shoulders rose and fell with each breath.
“I don’t think any knife is going to help you against one of those,” Riggs whispered.
“Activate frequency-beacons,” I said. “And no matter what happens, do not shoot.”
All five suit transponders lit on my HUD, distributing a tightbeam transmission across the surrounding area the likes of which I still didn’t really understand. The freq-beacon was a product of the current peace. A sort of specialised friend-or-foe identifier. Science Division insisted that this tech would make us identifiable to the Krell Collective—that the aliens would be able to differentiate us from the enemy. I’d never had the chance to use it before.
“We’re friendlies…” I said over an open comms channel.
With sweat breaking across my brow, I lowered my shotgun. I had to override the hind part of my brain, to work against the hardwiring that years of war had produced.
The Krell swivelled in my direction. The alien’s face was scarred behind the bio-helm—a jagged welt that stretched from its slit mouth to a deep-set black eye. Made an ugly face even uglier. More vague shapes coalesced from the dark.
I recognised the aliens as primary-forms. The Krell had a strict and rigid caste system, with each and every specimen being born into its role. Primary-forms were warrior-drones, prolific within most Collectives. There were other, more diversified bio-forms within the majority of shoals—including secondary-forms bred solely for the carrying of organic weaponry, and larger leader-forms which acted as battlefield commanders. I was glad that we weren’t dealing with some of the more esoteric off-shoots of the Krell genus…
After what felt like an age—but was probably only a heartbeat—words were projected onto my HUD.
I nodded. “All right.”
There was no perceptible change in the lead Krell’s facial expression, but I had to assume it was making contact. Again, this was new technology—a xeno-linguistics package which Sci-Div had assured us would allow for direct communication with the Krell warrior swarm. What I found most disturbing was the idea that I didn’t know what I was communicating with. I might be speaking to the warrior in front of me, or another alien further along the command chain could be using this one as a mouthpiece. Just one of the many complications of an alliance with an alien intelligence that relied on group consciousness…
The alien grasped the edges of the door panel and tore the metal framework with ease. I deactivated my mags and sailed onwards through the open hatch. The hole that the warrior had torn in the metal was easily big enough for the recon-suits to fit through and, dodging the jagged edges, I pulled myself into the waiting corridor. It was the scene of a massacre.
Six Krell primary-forms hung from the ceiling and walls. Except for the xeno with the scarred features, they were indistinguishable.
“My God,” Lopez said. Her face was crumpled behind her visor. “They stink…”
She had a point. The odour was rank, overwhelming. Every breath felt like I was being invaded. That was the case even though the aliens wore full-body suits. Their tech exuded the same repugnant odour as their alien bodies, perhaps a by-product of organic construction.
“Use your internal atmosphere supply,” I suggested, trying to hold my breath.
“Shut up, Lopez,” Riggs said. “The fish heads can detect comms waves between our suits…”
“They can’t understand though,” she said. Added: “Can they?”
“You’re not supposed to say ‘fish heads’ any more,” Feng said. His voice quivered, the sense of unease that we were now fighting with the Krell—that they were our allies—impossible to shake.
Orders. They wanted orders. That I could do.
“Fall in,” I said. “Follow us.”
“We’re … we’re really doing this…?” Lopez said.
Novak made a disapproving sound at the back of his throat. “Fucking fish heads,” he said, except that in his blunt Slavic accent it came out sounding like “fugging.”
The lead Krell twisted about-face, heading further into the station. The rest disengaged from their anchor-points. Using their webbed feet, they moved in the low gravity with an ease that I almost envied.
“Our odds of success have just improved significantly,” I said. “We’ve got another chance to get those officers out. Let’s show these fuckers how it’s done.”
Riggs made the Gaia sign over his chest. “Going to be hot and heavy.”
“Just how the boss likes it…” Novak said.
“So I hear,” Lopez replied.
United, simulant and Krell moved off down the corridor.
Tower One was almost a kilometre tall—the tallest of the three structures that made up Daktar Outpost. A hollow silo, sixty stories up and criss-crossed with gantries so thickly that visibility from the base to the tip was virtually nil. The structure was lined with external landing spars and docking berths upon which visiting transports could roost, with a series of lifts and cranes running the Tower’s edge. The lower levels were filled with cargo containers, anti-grav buggies, empty maintenance mechs: plenty of cover.
Not that we necessarily needed that, because the game had changed. The arrival of the Krell had irrevocably tipped the balance of the battle in our favour, and the Spiral’s discipline was crumbling. The sector around us was in chaos. Dozens of minor gunfights had broken out around the base of the Tower.
“Left flank,” I ordered, spying motion among some crates. A sentry. “See to it, Riggs.”
Before Riggs could react, one of the Krell primary-forms swooped forward. Seeing the alien at the last second, the Black Spiral agent lifted his assault rifle. The xeno was faster. The tango was shredded by claws and peppered with bio-weapons fire before he had a chance to shoot.
“Ah, thanks,” Riggs said.
The words floated on my HUD in a disarming way, and the scar-faced alien turned to look at me with those piercing, flat eyes.
“Hostages are up there,” I said. My face-plate provided enhanced visuals of the Tower’s interior but, again, I’d have killed for a drone or remote viewer. “At least according to the surveillance footage.”
Riggs squatted behind the nearest crate, consulting his bio-scanner. “I’m seeing multiple hostiles. Armed.” He flagged targets on the squad display channel, bouncing his visuals to my HUD. “This isn’t going to be easy.”
Although we could only see them from below, a dozen tangos patrolled the gantries, covering the obvious paths of ascent with overlapping arcs of fire. They wore vac-rated armour, clasped heavy rifles to their chests. Riggs selected a couple of more obvious targets and identified them on the joint-squad battle-net.
“Are those plasma rifles?” he asked.
“Looks like it.”
“How’d the Spiral get plasma rifles? Aren’t those restricted weapons?”
“Try telling them that,” Feng suggested.
These tangos wore the same ragged outer clothing as the rest of the insurgents, but something was wrong with this picture. These men moved differently, with a certain precision. At this range my suit couldn’t read their vital signs, but these guys didn’t seem phased by the presence of the simulant strike force or the Krell. That was something.
“They’re trained,” I concluded. “They’re taking their time up there, and they aren’t scared at all.”
“That can change,” Novak said. His shotgun had been lost in the fray back at the Control Room, and he was instead relying on his sidearm: an MP-600 Widowmaker.
“That’s not all,” Riggs offered. “Take a look at this…”
Far above us on the outer edge of the silo, nestled into one of the landing spars, was the outline of a ship. A small civilian-class transport vessel, of a sort found throughout the Alliance colonies. T
he ship’s rear access-ramp was deployed, and the Spiral were loading crates into the cargo hold. Her nose pointed towards the hangar door as though she was ready to take flight.
Riggs breathed out through his teeth. “Typical black-market job,” he said. “Her identification codes have been removed.”
The Krell floated restlessly nearby. The xeno I’d taken to thinking of as their leader looked decidedly pissed off with the lack of activity.
They’re still soldiers like the Jackals, I told myself. Only uglier.
“We need to get here,” I said, jabbing at my wrist-comp, at the map that showed where the hostages were being held. “That’s our target. Capisce?”
I felt pretty stupid talking to the Krell in Standard, as I had no idea how much they could actually understand, but the suit was supposed to be running a translation AI, sending out data-packets that the xeno would then pass up the command chain. The alien just stared blankly at me for a long second. Was it communicating with the rest of its Collective? Taking orders from some other fish head further along the intelligence trail, aboard the bio-ship?
Then all six of the aliens whipped about, and clambered onto the underside of gantries and walkways. They swiftly made their way up the Tower.
I evaluated the Jackals for a moment. They were battered and bruised, their armour covered in minor damage.
“Move up,” I said. “Fast as we can, but stay hidden. Activate stealth-fields.”
“Dumbshit terrorists,” Novak grunted. “Never see us coming.”
“Here’s to hoping,” Lopez said, disappearing as her stealth-field mimicked her surroundings.
The Jackals deployed. With the noise all around us, there was little prospect of being heard, and what with the activated stealth-tech we were almost invisible to the unassisted eye. The recon-suit’s strength-amplifier made short work of the climb: what would’ve been impossibly tiring in a real skin became an annoyance in the armour.
Meanwhile, moving much faster than us, the Krell primary-forms slithered upwards. Despite moving so close to the Spiral’s sentries, they remained undetected, their bodies appearing to merge with the surrounding structures in a similar way to our stealth-tech.
“I have eyes on the hostages,” Feng said. He was by now several stories up the Tower, and had a clear line of sight to the location we’d seen on the surveillance camera.
I bumped his view-feed to my own suit, and saw what he saw. There were six figures on one of the central gantries far above us. Their faces were covered with cloth sacks, hands secured behind backs with plastic ties. All wearing Alliance Army uniforms, and forced to stand upright: back to back, in a group.
“There are more guards watching them,” Feng added.
Three armoured shapes, carrying long-shot kinetic rifles, kept watch on the figures.
“I see them,” I said. I thought-flagged the guards. If we were going to recover those hostages intact, we needed to take the guards down. “Novak, Feng: I want you to move into position and—”
Text suddenly scrolled across my HUD.
The Krell materialised on the walkway above me. There was a flurry of activity, a garbled cry. Then the three Spiral sentries were dead, bodies floating free of the gantry.
“Wait!” I ordered. “I need everyone in position before—”
“They’re here!” a tango shouted.
Novak sprang from his hiding place, clambering onto another Spiral tango.
“Now this is work I like…” he roared, his laugh filling the comms line.
Around me, the Tower was suddenly filled with the sound of gunfire. Bright plasma pulses coursed the air. As though they were a single entity, the Krell fell onto the next group of Spiral agents.
The xeno’s body exploded in a bloody mess. It had taken at least a dozen direct hits to the chest, bio-armour ruptured. Fish guts spilled from the resultant wound. The primary-form floated past me. Dead. I bit back anger at the Krell’s premature execution of the plan.
“Taking fire!” Feng said. He let out a garbled yell, body jerking in micro-G. I heard Lopez cursing sympathetically over the comm.
Feng’s bio-signs flatlined on my HUD. His body span past, stitched by plasma bolts. As the stealth-field powered down, and he became visible, the Spiral reacted immediately. It felt like every tango in the Tower was firing at Feng’s body.
And then it wasn’t just Feng that the Spiral could see: it was all of us. Slugs spanked the metal gantries around me, tracers slashing the air.
“How can they see us?” Lopez asked, her voice rising shrilly. I’d lost her position—didn’t even know where she was any more. “We have stealth-fields!”
“Just keep moving. Get up there!”
I fired my EVAMP and went up another level. The distance between gantries left me exposed, but I had little choice—
There was a tango on the walkway, and as I touched down he managed to loose a shot. The low-bore slug bounced off my plate like rain on a tin roof, ineffectual and impotent. The sucker behind the face-plate didn’t seem to care: man was wired on neuro-agents, or had a death wish of some kind. I was close enough that I could see his glassy eyes, see the spittle on his lips.
“I don’t have time for this!” I roared.
The shoulder of my suit met bone and tissue, and he hit the safety rail of the gantry on which we stood. Angrily, I threw the body over the edge, away from me.
“Riggs: prisoners! Now!”
“I’m there,” Riggs said.
He had reached the top of the silo, where the prisoners were being held. Novak was trailing behind, covering his approach with his Widowmaker. I dropped onto a knee and popped advancing Spiral. Hoping to clear a safe zone around them, hoping that we could withdraw with at least some of the hostages alive.
“Objective secured,” Riggs said, voice tinged with pride.
Riggs had the prisoners. His back was to them, shotgun blasting.
“I’m here too,” Lopez said.
She was beneath us, moving up. Firing her EVAMP clumsily, bouncing between gantries.
“Docking lock is opening,” the station’s AI declared, voice barely audible above the din. “All personnel take immediate safety precautions…”
Another complication.
Air pressure was dropping. The hangar bay doors in front of the mystery transport were opening, and the Tower’s atmosphere was escaping fast. Red emergency lamps strobed overhead.
“We need to get those people out of here,” I said. The hostages would need respirators at the very least.
Riggs pulled free the bag covering the nearest prisoner’s face.
Shit.
The prisoner’s hands weren’t tied at all.
Shit.
They were free, and they reached for the explosive-pack on his chest.
Shit.
Because the information I was receiving was so incomprehensible—because it made no sense at first—I took a microsecond to process it. Nothing more than that, but enough for the sham prisoner to react.
Riggs was even slower. His brow creased in abject confusion.
Big and dumb. Just how I like them…
In unison, the prisoners reached for their explosive-packs.
“Down!” I yelled.
Then the central hangar exploded.
With the hangar doors open, and atmosphere escaping, there was little to no oxygen left in the silo to burn, but the charge-packs carried just the right chemical combination to self-detonate. Perhaps that was another indication that the Spiral were more organised than Command had recognised. The resultant blast—which claimed the lives of the sham-hostages, as well as Corporal Riggs’ simulant—was furious but short-lived.
Riggs had made a very rookie mistake—left his mag-locks on—and he didn’t deactivate them fast enough
when the bomb went off. Like a target on a range, he snapped backwards: folding. Both legs were broken in the ensuing explosion, and it was immediately obvious that no amount of medical assistance was going to salvage those limbs. He spiralled past me, weaponless, arms outstretched in a star shape. Hit the far wall, fifty or so metres distant, at speed, with enough force to shatter every bone in his body.
Dead. Dead. Dead.
Less than an hour ago, we’d been sharing my bunk back on the Bainbridge. Less than an hour ago, Corporal Riggs hadn’t known what it felt like to die in combat. His eyes were wide, blood-filled, hands reaching out to me, fingers clutching at something that wasn’t there. Even if this death wasn’t real—wasn’t final—it hurt all the same, and not just for Riggs. Sorry Riggs, I thought. There was nothing that I could say to make it any easier. I knew; I’d been there two hundred and ten times myself. Better luck next time.
It was probably experience that saved me. I triggered my EVAMP. In an uncontrolled jump, I sailed to the end of the catwalk. Caught the safety rail with one hand. A bone-jarring impact spread up my right arm—a shockwave of pain that went through the rest of my body. With a grunt, I snagged my arm around the rail and pulled myself up.
It was much worse than I’d thought. The network of catwalks and gantries had been torn up in the explosion, with debris randomly thrown across the silo. Splinters of sharp metal flew past me, and I just managed to dodge a railing that had been turned into a spear by the force of the explosion. There were bodies everywhere. Krell, simulant, Spiral.
But not everyone was dead. Every surviving tango was scrambling up the Tower, using all efforts to escape the dying structure. Their target: the Spiral’s ship. Still in its docking cradle, the starship sat a level above me, ready to launch.
“Novak! Lopez!” I yelled, trying to recalibrate after the madness.
Something moved fast beside me. I swept my shotgun around—somehow, impossibly, I’d managed to keep hold of that during the explosion—and readied to fire again.
“Here!” Novak said. “Reporting.”
He popped into existence on my face-plate, his outline flashing as he sailed past, his EVAMP thrusters firing intermittently.