by B. V. Larson
“Look,” I said, lowering my voice. “Let’s be realistic about it. Do you think you’re big enough to be a weaponeer?”
He looked startled. “Um, no. Not really sir.”
“Right. How about a tech wizard? You got circuitry in your brain? You love gadgets?”
“Well… no. I get bored by computers very fast.”
Already, he was looking down, staring at the mud and frowning. I had him on the hook, I could tell. All I had to do was reel him in.
“What about the medical fields? You think you want to run revival machines, clean bed-robots, learn to perform surgical—?”
“No way, Centurion! I’m a killer, not a meat-repairman.”
“Exactly. So, let’s be realistic. If you’re ever going to advance in the ranks, you’ve got to become some kind of specialist.”
He sighed. “Yeah… and I know you’re trying to help me out, sir, but I’ve been ground up and shit back out of revival machines so many times already… I don’t know if scouting—”
“Fine,” I said gruffly, stepping away from him. I turned and scanned the group. “Sarah!” I boomed. “Sarah, come up here.”
“Wait!” Cooper said.
I turned back to face him. “What?”
“I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll play bunny-rabbit.”
“Ghost, Cooper. Get it right. You’re a ghost in training now. Here’s a sack of buzzers and special rifle.”
“Got it, sir.”
He examined the equipment with interest. The one thing that caught his eye was the fold-out poncho that slid from a bag. It shimmered like a cloak of woven silver.
“Is this…?” he asked. “Oh, cool!”
Happily, he put on the stealth suit. It had been copied from captured Vulbite designs but tailored and redesigned to fit a human. With the suit on, he vanished from sight.
Sarah came trotting up with her blue eyes peering up at me under a fringe of blonde hair. Bright and eager, she reminded me of the indulgent thoughts I’d once had regarding her during a meeting in my office.
Managing to keep it professional, I made the same pitch to her about becoming a spook. Cooper watched closely while stealthed. Sarah ignored him—I don’t think she even knew he was standing there with us.
But Sarah had different ideas. “I’m not cut out for that kind of work, sir. I passed my finals and I’m about to be promoted out of here as a bio specialist.”
“Congratz,” I said, and I meant it. “But… um… what if you don’t like recycling folks?”
Sarah made a disgusted face.
“I’m not looking forward to that part,” she admitted. “But this is the end of the line for me. If I hate my life as a bio… well, I’m going to ditch this legion entirely.”
I nodded. “Good enough. I’m already looking forward to your tender mercies. But for now, go on back to your platoon… and Cooper? You’re my bunny. Start hopping.”
Making a vague gesture forward, I aimed a finger toward the massive trees.
A region of air moved and there was a slight flapping sound. Sarah looked startled. “Cooper has a stealth suit?”
“That’s right,” I said. “You want in as a Ghost after all?”
Sarah shook her head. “I’ll stick to what I know.”
I watched as she returned to the light platoon. Everyone else in the unit was staring at the rugged mountains and the looming forest of alien trees. Now that we’d gotten close, the mist had broken, and they could see the towering mega-flora.
“Holy shit…” Harris breathed.
“What?”
“We were out here, sir, not more than a week back. That forest—it’s grown. It’s grown a lot.”
I nodded, unimpressed. “The enemy is comprised mainly of trees, Harris,” I said. “Storm World just watered the hell out of them. What’d you expect?”
Hushed by the looming presence of the trees, my unit struggled forward. We soon left the hills of crumbling black stone and walked among the trees. The ground was much more firm here.
Could it be that these monstrous growths had sucked the water and nutrients from the land with such greed they’d changed a swamp into solid ground? Its effect seemed odd, but undeniable.
We found our first walker less than a kilometer deep into the forest. Cooper found it, actually. He reported in to say he’d spotted the monster, and he wanted to know what he should do about it.
“You think he sees you?” I asked.
“Probably not, sir,” Cooper admitted in a whisper. “He looks fresh-born. He’s just standing there, swaying as if confused.”
Pod-walkers were akin to mobile trees. They had long limbs of brownish green and skin like wet bark. There were no eyes or a face, but there were fronds that hung from the body. These sickly-orange fronds ended in polyps that flopped and pulsated. They were sensory organs—bulbs of nerves that could sense light, heat and even sniff the air.
The walkers were born out of the gigantic mega-flora, which also resembled trees. These trees were hundreds of meters tall and grew very quickly. When threatened, they grew pods which contained the walkers to defend them.
“The Wur are true freaks,” I said, paging through the stills and video Cooper was taking as he scouted the scene.
Suddenly, the pod-walker we’d been observing stirred. Instead of standing there with dangling orange fronds puffing and contracting, it turned its body.
A chill ran through me, despite the fact I was far from the scene. The walker had turned to face Cooper.
Could it have seen through his stealth gear? Of course it could have, I realized. The stealth suit was intended to disguise a man from human eyes, operating in the visual spectrum our species could see.
Walkers were an unknown. We weren’t even sure whether they could see in the infrared or the ultraviolet—or really “see” at all. In a worst-case scenario, it might be able to detect a moving body in both those frequencies of light.
Wisely, Cooper had hit the dirt and stopped talking. I stayed quiet too, but he’d probably squelched my voice anyway. I was still getting an optical feed, however, from the sensors on his helmet.
Working my tapper, I transmitted the feed to Natasha. She’d recently rejoined my unit, and I was glad to have her back. She was the best tech I knew.
“This is amazing,” her voice spoke in my ear. “I’m coming forward, sir.”
I didn’t object. I needed her input.
The Wur were possibly our worst potential enemies. They had, long ago, been the power behind the throne of the Cephalopods. They were everywhere, tucked away on small forgotten planets.
They operated like a disease that slept in the body until triggered. We suspected they were in several provinces of the Empire as well as the frontier regions. Often dormant, unseen and unchallenged, they waited until the time was ripe for an infestation.
But, for all their skill and frequency of appearance, they’d only attacked Earth once. We’d gone straight out to Death World afterward to return the favor. Perhaps because of our vehement counterstrike, they’d decided to leave us alone for decades.
They were masterful terraformers, seeding worlds previously thought uninhabitable. Most planets weren’t even tracked inside the Empire itself—there were billions of them, after all. On those forgotten worlds, they dug in and made a habitat until that world was swollen and popped, spreading more of their spores into the cosmos.
Natasha arrived, and we knelt together, staring into the hanging mists between the gigantic trees. The forest was so dense, the trees so massive in size, it looked like a cave ahead of us. It didn’t help that the skies above were crawling with clouds, blocking the sunlight.
“It’s the Wur,” she said. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen them.”
She shivered, and I put a hand on her arm. Natasha didn’t have fond memories of the Wur. One version of her had been permed, in fact, by these creatures. Fortunately, another copy of her had lived in hiding on Dust World. I’d brou
ght her home, and helped her keep Hegemony in the dark concerning the switch.
“One unit can’t fight an army of these things, James,” she said.
“There’s only one pod-walker right now, and it’s just staring at Cooper.”
“There will be more.”
As if she were the voice of a doom-laden prophesy, Cooper swung his head and the vid pickup caught another cracking motion. Another pod-walker, closer than the first, stepped out of its husk and stood there, swaying.
“Cooper,” I said quietly. “Withdraw.”
“It’s too late,” he whispered.
He shifted his point of view gently again, scanning the horizon around him. There were seven pods now. He was surrounded.
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It kind of pissed me off that I’d just gone out of my way to recruit Cooper, despite his concerns, and the damned pod-walkers had come for him less than an hour later.
“We’ll distract them,” I said. “Then you’ll withdraw. Creep south, come around…”
“Thanks, Centurion,” Cooper whispered back, and I knew he meant it.
Natasha’s eyes caught mine, and she stared at me in alarm. “James, we shouldn’t—”
“We should go back inside our walls and hide, yes, I know. Let the Wur eat Cooper—so what? Then tonight, maybe we’ll get lucky enough to hide behind another storm. Then we can ignore what’s going on out here in this forest for another day, or another week. Natasha, they’re getting stronger every day. We’ve got to push back, or we’re doomed.”
She looked down and nodded. I wasn’t sure if she agreed with me or not, but she wasn’t going to argue. That was good enough for me.
I ordered my light troops to fan out and advance. If they could start sniping at the walkers, we could draw them off Cooper’s tail and let him escape.
It was a risky move, of course. If there were only seven freshly-hatched pod-walkers, well, we could take down that many, no problem.
It was the unknowns in the forest that worried my troops. There might be ten more—or a thousand. It was hard to tell.
“I need intel. Kivi, Natasha, fly your buzzers everywhere. I don’t care if they’re spotted. Give me a count on the enemy.”
They did as I’d ordered, and Barton’s platoon of lights formed a widely-separated line that marched deep into the trees and the low-lying mists swallowed them up.
“Harris,” I said, “take your heavies and advance in the second rank. Set your morph-rifles for maximum punch.”
He looked at me for a long second. His eyes were wide, and I knew he thought I was crazy. But he just shook his head and signaled his armored troops to advance.
“Let me guess,” Leeson said, coming up to crouch beside me. “My weaponeers are supposed to kill these things while everyone else does a dance to distract them, right?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
He sighed. “Where do you want me on this field?”
“You know your job. You stay in place—but don’t sit back too far. The forward troops won’t last long in close quarters.”
Grunting, Leeson rallied his troops and they broke out special equipment. Belchers and two 88s were on hand. Leeson had insisted on dragging the light artillery on the backs of two pigs—walking drones—all the way out from the base. I realized now that might have been a critical move. It was hard to take out walkers with small arms.
If Cooper was good at one thing, it was sneaking around. Glancing at his feed on my tapper now and then, I saw the pod-walkers still hadn’t nailed him.
They were moving, however. Roaming now and milling around the area, I could tell they were still a bit confused by their birth and not fully cognizant. They moved like zombies sniffing for a scent.
Cooper stayed low in a spot encircled by thick tree roots. I could see the intelligence of that. The pod-walkers weren’t likely to find him, and even if they did, they wouldn’t want to damage the root system of their parent trees in order to dig him out of his bolt-hole.
As I watched, I heard snap-rifle fire from the forest. Glancing up, then back at the tapper video, I saw one of the pod-walkers shiver.
More firing, followed by more reactions from the walkers.
“They’re taking the bait!” Leeson shouted. “McGill, pull the lights back! They’ve done their job.”
I checked out the data from a swarm of buzzers. He was right. The walkers had begun moving with purpose toward the stinging snap-rifle fire.
“Adjunct Barton,” I said, “time to skirmish. Keep pecking at them, but withdraw at a trot back to our lines.”
Like clockwork, I saw the light troops reverse themselves. Barton had excellent control. She’d been drilling her men night and day ever since we’d left Earth, and it was obviously paying off.
The walkers, however, were speeding up. They were moving with purpose now. Their massive legs, easily five meters tall, swung through the ferns and undergrowth, picking up speed.
I’d seen this sort of behavior before. The Wur underlings—moronic creatures like these pod-walkers—would often work themselves into a frenzy. They’d mass-up, forming a charging wave, and surge right over us.
“Harris, tuck your people into that root structure out there. Keep them separated, and wait to fire until the walkers are on top of you.”
“Permission to edit the plan, sir!” Harris barked back at me.
I winced. I’d made a point of letting the commander on the spot alter my orders. Since I was only a few hundred meters away from his position, it seemed like Harris was abusing my policy. Still, I decided to stick to my philosophy.
“Permission granted.”
He broke off and began shouting detailed orders to his platoon. In the meantime, I moved to where Leeson was setting up his two 88s.
The weaponeers had them off the pigs, and the tripods were quickly extended.
“Right here?” I asked him. “On open ground?”
“Yep,” Leeson said. “I want to get a clear field of fire. If Harris can ding them up, I can finish them with a kill zone right here. 88s don’t shoot through tree trunks as big as these, sir.”
“All right,” I said, shaking my head.
I could hear the Wur now. They were hooting, raising an odd, warbling cry from their upper bodies. To me, they looked like gigantic headless men.
Finding an extra belcher, I knelt and added my weight to our line. Our thin line was manned by white-faced troops. No one was joking around, not even Carlos.
About half our number had fought back on Death World. The rest had heard stories and watched training vids on the topic. The Wur were dangerous, if only because plants always seemed to be harder to kill than creatures of flesh and bone.
Soon, we could hear their footsteps. The sound swelled up and each step turned into a booming report.
Out on the front line, Harris had indeed edited my instructions. Instead of firing point-blank, he waited until the line of walkers had passed overhead. Then, in unison, his armored troops lit up the walkers, hitting them hard in the ass.
A series of whoops went up from my own side. Two of the creatures went down, thrashing. One got up, but the other was missing a leg entirely. It turned and crawled toward the attackers, dragging its injured body behind it.
Excited, Harris’ troops advanced and pounded heavy shots into the ass end of any Wur they encountered.
The move was dramatic and powerful—but I felt it was premature.
“Harris, get your men to pull back. Keep your line hot and ready.”
“They’re mostly coming to you, sir,” Harris objected. “There are just two here, and one of them is down already.”
As I watched, the armored troops advanced on the Wur that crawled toward them. They fired their morph-rifles again and again. White patches appeared in the dark smooth bark that served it for skin. Bleeding sap and other less identifiable fluids, the walker shivered and thrashed about—but it kept crawling.
“Shit…” I said, watching
events unfold rapidly. I didn’t have time to argue with Harris. The main line of pod-walkers was about to sweep up and hit my light platoon at a dead run.
There’s something about big creatures—truly, monstrously large creatures—when they charge at you, you can’t help but feel a wave of fear.
I’m sure that somewhere in the back of my monkey-brain, some distant McGill ancestor had faced a charge like this. Maybe it had happened back when the world was young, when mastodons, saber-tooths, and a thousand other giants roamed the Earth.
They came so fast. Once a walker was committed to a charge, each step came more swiftly than the last. Already, they had to be running faster than a dog could run. Huge legs, each as deadly as a swinging tree trunk, brought them closer with shocking speed.
I almost gave the order to fire—but Leeson beat me to it.
“Begin sweeps! Merge center!”
Two beams leapt out to the far sides of the charging enemy line. There were only five of them, as two had been held up by Harris, but that felt like plenty.
The outer two monsters took the brunt of the 88s shocking power. Flash-fried, they were turned into running torches. The orange fronds melted away. Like nests of frenzied snakes, these sensitive organs tried to withdraw into their host bodies, but it was hopeless. They were vaporized in a split-second.
The torsos were tougher. They burned, yes, but they didn’t disintegrate the way a smaller mass would. Men, when touched by these awful weapons, were struck dead immediately.
Still, the outer two went down hard. They pitched forward, thrashing and flailing. Berserk with agony and blinded, they tumbled and shook the ground. More weaponeers working belchers lanced their bodies repeatedly, trying to finish them.
The 88s were on a sweep, and they converged toward the center from each side. The second two were caught next, and they were taken out as well. If anything, they died faster. Maybe that was because we were at shorter range and the hot beams from the 88s hit that much harder.
The last pod-walker, however, was just moving too fast. Leeson and I had both miscalculated. The walkers had been accelerating, and the two converging beams didn’t make it to the center walker before he got to us.