Kodaira, Puente, Marek, and Simmons. Half of the team was gone. They’d stayed tight, fought well, fought better than well, and all things considered, Kaye thought a 50 percent survival rate was still pretty goddamn good. It was the worst he’d ever been in, seen, even heard about.
He took a deep breath, leaned against the rocky wall, worked to regain his focus. The anger always burned, it was there when he needed the energy and would keep him going now. If they actually survived to the compound, he’d sure as hell make sure that the Fantasians fully comprehended that anger, every last one of ’em.
11
Vin set them down less than twenty meters from the fallen ship, crushing a number of the screeching aliens beneath the Avarice. It was a bumpy set down, but Ray barely noticed, too intent on the bug-covered prize. They’d landed practically next to the AD room, back of the ship; there was a door to cargo from there, Mullin had drawn him a diagram of the layout way back when. Msomi’s ship was as dead as roadkill.
The boys were suited and pumped, carrying major heat. Rifles, machine pistols, “shucked” tasers, the power-kill removed to provide infinite voltage; Marsten and Hess kept making jokes about jitterbugging. They were all dressed in combat armor, wore long-sleeved deflect shirts beneath the heavy chest protector. Everyone had on helmets with drop-down shields, everyone was wired for sound. Because Ray didn’t expect them to be away for more than ten minutes, tops, he’d gone light on the oxy packs, not wanting anyone to get weighed down; each wore a simple nose-filter connected to a slim shoulder pack. Enough air for an hour, more than enough time to do what needed doing.
Tap the ship. Get the product and be gone, before Trace even knows what hit him.
Six of the seven crew members would be going out, to hold off the bugs while Vin opened the ship’s back door, courtesy of a concussion slap-pack; anyone still alive inside would be taken out by a couple of frag grenades. From there, it was only a matter of moving the product. They wouldn’t be taking the heavy bags of skritch or smack, just the “blankets” of MX7 patches. MX7 was worth a fuckload more and easier to transport.
The excited mood of the crew dampened a bit once they were finally down, as the XTs surrounded the Avarice, began pounding on its well-shielded doors. Vin reset the outside camo paneling to match the surface rock, but with no wall to become a part of, the bugs weren’t fooled; they continued to shriek and hammer, clawing at the expensive gear. A few warnings peeped from the ship’s main console; the creatures were causing damage to the micro-cam layer. Ray winced, thinking of how much the ship’s modifications had cost him, but shrugged it off. He’d buy a new ship. He’d buy a fucking fleet of new ships.
Ian Carson stood at the door, ready to open it. He had suited up, too, though he would be staying on the Avarice, with Ray. Carson wasn’t a fighter . . . and besides Vin, he was the only other qualified pilot onboard. In case anything went awry—which it wouldn’t—it was smart to have a backup. Someone needed to open and close the lock, though, and Ray planned on being terribly busy overseeing the action, providing direction as needed.
“Jiminy H. Fuckall,” Hess said, looking out at the howling things. The cams were getting a lot of badass closeups, all slavering jaws and clawing fingers. Time to get things moving, before they had too much time to worry about what waited for them outside.
“Let’s do this,” Ray said, stepping up to the main cabin’s console, away from the lock. It was only wide enough for two men to go through at once, but with both men firing, Ray figured they could cover the rest of the boys getting out. Carson opened the inner door, Marsten and Hess stepping in together. Vin waited behind them, the others—Duffy, Wilson, and Jie—crowded around him.
“Yeah,” Marsten breathed, lowering his face mask. He flicked his meter-long taser, a vicious crackle of power snapping from the end nodes. “Jitterbuggin’, baby.”
“On my go,” Vin said. He nodded at Carson. Carson fumbled his mask down, gave a shaky nod back.
“Go!”
The tech hit the outer lock. Marsten and Hess charged forward, into the screaming dark, the taser cracking, Hess firing an endless stream of rounds.
“Move!” Vin shouted, and hurtled out after them.
Ray turned his attention to the console, eagerly watched his team dive headlong into vicious battle even as they stepped out of the ship, picking up a good view from one of the roof cams, bugs were dropping all over the place—
—but something was wrong, because Ian Carson was screaming. Ray whipped around, saw a long, black arm dragging Carson out of the lock by his throat.
Shit! “They’ve got Carson!” Ray shouted, slamming the override on the console, the lock slamming closed, fucking loser tech couldn’t even close the goddamn door—
Vin was screaming, too. And Hess, and Marsten, and all of them. For every alien going down, three were climbing over its fallen form, clawing at the strung-out line of shooters, surrounding each one. Ray watched in numb astonishment as the creatures snatched up his firing, tasing, fighting boys one by one, and ran away with them.
Ray was petrified by his disbelief. He didn’t understand what was happening. Months, years of working up capital, working up plans . . . And the months of wooing Trace’s strawberry away, working all the harder at it once Mullin had been taken out. The long days just spent sitting on this rock, waiting . . . All of it over in less than a minute. Less than half of one.
The screams went on, though, the pleas of his boys ringing through the empty cabin of the ship he couldn’t fly until Ray finally thought to shut off the speaker.
* * *
They heard the ship set down, even over Frank’s ongoing string of curses. Lee had them all move to the AD’s corridor entrance, an uphill climb the way the ship was tilted, and crouch behind a bench row. Moby kept trying to argue with him, saying that if they were so safe, why were they bothering to take cover, but Lee shrugged him off. Lee had stopped making even a minimal effort to act civilly toward any of them; he was grim and silent and entirely focused, and while Pete pretty much feared and hated Lee, he also admired that façade, a little.
Maybe that was the problem. Growing up, he’d always wanted to be the tough guy. The emotionless villain, the machine-like killer, cool and distant and unafraid. That guy never faltered, never cared what others thought—never got hurt.
Even thinking it now, crouched next to his older brother in a dead ship full of product, aliens and drug thieves just outside, he felt like a monumental idiot for not understanding himself any better until right this second. A shitty, tortured childhood, and he wanted to grow up and have no feelings. He’d heard it before, of course, pop psych 101—but he’d never really believed it of himself.
“Tommy,” he whispered.
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry, man.”
Tommy nodded vaguely. “Yeah, I know.”
Pete leaned closer to him. “No, I know I keep saying it, but this is different. I’m not sorry we’re here—”
He checked himself, laughed a little. Moby, on Pete’s left, nudged him to shut up.
“That came out wrong,” Pete whispered. “I mean, that’s not what I’m apologizing for. I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry that I’m a fucking moron.”
Tommy stared at him, his eyes purple-black in the ever-dimming emergency lights. “Wow.”
“Yeah,” Pete said. “There’s nothing cool about this. About them. I want to piss my pants.”
“Wow,” Tommy said again.
“If . . .” Pete started, and let it trail. He’d been about to say If Mom hadn’t died, or If Dad had kept his shit together . . . But that wasn’t a conversation they had time for. Outside, a gun was firing. Two, then perhaps two more picked up the staccato bursts, the clatter of rounds joined by the rising shrieks of the bugs.
“If we get out of this, I’ll do better,” he said. He smiled a little. “Even if we don’t, I’ll do better.”
Tommy smiled back at him. “I really like the moron pa
rt.”
“Yeah, I thought you would,” Pete said.
A man was screaming now, high-pitched and wavering, the sound only audible over the alien horde because it was insanely, terminally loud. Another anguished cry, lower, angrier, joined the first. The gunfire became scarce, then disappeared altogether. All they could hear were the aliens now, their mindless, repetitive shrieks, their hard bodies bouncing off the ship and each other.
Moby laughed, a short bark of disbelief. “That was it? That was the best they could do?”
Frank slammed a fist against the bench, his eyes squinting in red-faced victory. “Yeah! Yeah, motherfuckers!”
Lee relaxed very slightly, in that he actually deigned to speak.
“Now we wait,” he said. “Trace will send someone.”
Pete couldn’t relax, realizing they’d have to go back to the compound. If anything, he felt even more wound up. Not because of Trace, for what had happened with Didi, though he’d definitely be avoiding a few people for the rest of his stay—but because he wanted to go home. He wanted to be far away from all this shit, now and forever . . . And on some deep, instinctual level, he didn’t really believe that they were going to make it.
* * *
Didi sat on their bed and scrolled through the message a fourth and fifth time, struggling to make sense of it. She’d patched heavy before pulling out the text device, desperate to get away from herself, from everyone, and now she was paying for it. It took her a long time to digest the information that had been waiting for her, demanding an immediate decision.
The crew is dead, she read. Operation aborted. Need you to come for me, we’re camo at the site, N of ship. Bring him here, I’ll kill him for you and you can fly us home. You don’t come, I die, it’s all over. Your life can start today, Didi. You know you can make it happen. Hurry.
He wanted her to go outside. That would be bad, she thought. The bugs were beautiful but terrible, too, they were monsters. She’d never been asked to go outside, for any reason. And she didn’t want to die. She could break the text device into pieces, run them through the kitchen incinerator, no one need ever know that she’d done anything.
That was the safest thing . . . But was it the best thing? He wanted her to risk her life—but he also wanted to kill Trace. Trace, who believed he loved her but was small and sick inside, too, he’d squirmed into her head and she hated that he was there, hated him enough to want him dead. She’d longed for it, ever since her first contact with Ray. And it could happen now, right now. Her life could finally begin.
And if I do nothing . . . Ray died. No assassin would come for Trace. She’d be here forever, Trace’s pet, brought out to fuck strangers while he thought up new ways to humiliate her. MX7 made it livable, but it wasn’t living.
You know you can make it happen. She considered that. It was an expression of his belief in her, gratifying, but could she? Yes, of course. Trace was organizing a “rescue” out to the ship, even now; they were having some trouble pinning its location because of the disruptions in their equipment, but he’d talked about what-ifs before, God, how he loved to hear himself talk—he’d send someone out to do a fly-by first, a little recon . . .
A fly-by first. The plan unfolded effortlessly. Didi thought about what it would take. Very little, actually. A smile, a whispered promise.
Take me out, baby. I want to see. Someone has to go out anyway, it could be us. And I have a gift for you . . .
Yes, she could rearrange things. Trace owned her, but she was far from powerless. The few times she’d taken an initiative, early on, he’d fallen all over himself to lick it up. If she was going to do it, though, she had to act fast, before Ops got everything running again. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she wished she hadn’t patched. Time had a way of melting away when she was patched. And she sometimes forgot things.
Don’t think. Go. Do it, now.
Didi tapped in the letters, watched them spell out across the tiny screen. Open the door for us, she typed—hesitated, then sent it.
She didn’t think about how she was going to work out the actual boarding of the ship, but she was sure an opportunity would present itself. She felt very positive, over all, exhilarated by the sudden change of plan. She tucked the device under the front of a bra strap, then grabbed the entire baggie of patches out of the carved box, slipped it into her pocket. Just in case.
She leaned across the bed, slapped the com button. “Trace?”
He answered immediately, he always did when she called. She could hear Ops behind him, someone cursing, a clang of metal.
“Yeah, baby.”
“I’ve got an idea,” she said, feeling an incredible rush of power with the words, her first real step toward freedom. She could do this. She could.
“I’m kind of busy, sweetheart—”
“Listen,” she whispered, and by the way he caught his breath, she knew it was as good as done.
12
They ran across three more groups of the XTs in the slog through the black tunnels. Twice, they used the incinerators to back them to a side tunnel, dropping them with concussion grenades. The third time, there were no side tunnels—and when Graham’s incinerator abruptly went dry, Daniel Aaronson was snatched up by one of the grinning aliens, dragged screaming away from the safety of the small group. Several of the creatures went with him, falling back to protect their prize, and the surviving team members—Ng, Graham, Borkez, and himself—listened to Aaronson gasp and curse for a full minute after they’d managed to put down the remaining group, the signal finally breaking on the thick walls of rock that sprang up between them.
Graham took it hard. He threw the dead incinerator at one of the fallen bugs, screamed fuck a few times. It was the first crack Kaye had seen in any of them.
“Ng, you’re point,” he said. “Stand by. Borkez, get us a new read.”
She unpacked the SSR post, started tapping on her wrist keys. They had to be close now. They had one cartridge left for the incinerator, maybe three minutes of continuous flame at the force they needed it. They weren’t bad on rounds, but without fire, they wouldn’t be able to hold the bugs back for long.
Graham—he had a first name, but hell if Kaye could remember it—had taken out his piece, an Uzi, the twenty round mag taped to a second, upside down; when he went dry, he could flip the mag. He was aiming it randomly at the sprawl of dead XTs. Smoke rose from the rock beneath them. His face was hidden by the mask, but his stance, drooping shoulders, hanging head—his shit wasn’t holding, as it were. Kaye considered saying something, but not having any idea what held him back.
“Got it,” Borkez said, her head snapping up. She pointed past the dead XTs. “Sixty meters, due east. Burn steel, covered with about two meters of crushed rock. We’ll have to slap two, three more holes to get there.”
“Got to be the outside of their main drop lock,” Kaye said. It was the compound’s westernmost point. Outstanding.
“All right,” he said. “When we get inside, we’ll execute as planned. Ng, point. Graham, Borkez, flank, and I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” Graham interrupted. “Lead us to victory?” He let out a short bark of laughter. “Fuck the operation. We should be trying to cut a deal.”
Kaye stared at him. “Cut a deal?”
Graham didn’t back down. “We don’t have the manpower to pull this off, not anymore. Intel says they’ll blow the locks when they realize we’re inside, which means more XTs on top of crowd control. We can’t do it.”
“We can,” Kaye said firmly.
“But if we go in offline—call a truce—keep them from opening the locks, we’d have a shot. We could negotiate for one of their transports, get back to the ship—”
“Negotiate with what?” Kaye asked. “Give us a flyer, or we’ll be forced to go die outside?”
“So we take one,” Graham said. “You said we’re at the drop lock, right? We just go in and take one, get back to our ship.”
“Simmons was our only certified pilot—”
“Auto can take care of it,” Graham said.
“—and Aaronson was our best tech,” Kaye continued. “It’s going to take twice as long to get airborne, and I doubt very much that the Fantasians are going to leave us alone while we’re working.”
Graham nodded. “Right, okay. We cut a deal, like I said. We take hostages.”
Kaye looked to the other two. Ng kept his attention on the cave in front of them. Borkez had repacked the radar equipment and was watching the exchange, her expression hidden by her mask. No one was jumping in to back Graham, but they weren’t telling him to shut up, either.
Kaye nodded slowly. They didn’t have time for any of this, but unless he could convince them that their best bet was to proceed as planned, he might be going it alone. They were professionals, but they weren’t sheep. More than half the team was gone already. Ahead of them, distorted alien cries echoed off the dark gray rock.
“You may be right,” Kaye said carefully. “We’ve lost five people, and our supplies are running low. I know it’s not an ideal situation. But calling a truce with these, these animals isn’t an option—you know it isn’t—and we can’t go back to our ship without first making sure that there won’t be a counterattack. If we get in, and taking hostages is our best bet, we’ll do it. Our primary objective is survival. After that, we do what we can to close this installation down. And I think we’ve still got a shot at it.”
Graham opened his mouth to say something, but the sudden deep rumbling that filled the dark caverns stopped him. They all listened to the heavy sound, the tell-tale whine of a warming flyer drive just audible through the layers of rock and metal.
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 16