by Rick Partlow
“Let me,” the NCO said, tapping his visor demonstratively.
Ash handed the weapon and shoulder bag over a bit sheepishly, and stepped back, retrieving his blasting charge from Busick. Kamara was enveloped in billowing clouds of smoke, and flashes of vaporizing dirt and rocks sparked up around him, but he stood statue-like, unaffected. He tossed an empty mag on the ground behind him, and went through one other before he turned back through the curtain of smoke and steam and motioned the others forward.
Weaver knelt down beside the laser-excavated hole and popped open the catches of the case he’d been carrying, pulling out a bright yellow metal cylinder and lowering it carefully into the hole. Ash watched with what he knew was an irrational anxiety; he knew the charges were safe to handle, but still, that was a lot of HyperExplosives…
The Chief of Boat placed the charge, then looked back at the others, frowning.
“We don’t have a remote detonator for these things,” he said, as if just realizing it. “I can use the timer instead.” He scanned the edges of the hollow, shielding his eyes from the biting wind with the blade of his hand. “I’ll give it thirty minutes. Shouldn’t take even half that to place the other two charges, so that should give us plenty of time to clear the area.”
Half an hour seemed awfully short to Ash, but he figured the Chief must know what he was doing.
“All right,” Weaver said, hopping up from the hole, still wreathed in smoke. He grabbed the charge cases from Busick and Ash, holding one in each hand as he nodded to Kamara. “This way, Gunny.”
Ash shrugged as the two of them headed off across the hollow, feet sinking deep into the snow with each step.
“Guess we’re not needed,” he said to Busick, stuffing his hands in his jacket pockets now that he no longer had to carry the blasting charge or the carbine. “Maybe we should start getting everyone else moving away from here.”
“I wonder how far is safe,” she mused, trudging along beside him as they leaned forward to climb back up the hillside. “Half a kilometer, maybe?”
“I’m thinking the other side of that,” Ash opined, pointing at the highest of the surrounding hills, climbing up perhaps a hundred meters in elevation from the hilltop where the others were gathered, a good two hundred above the hollowed out bowl where the charges were being set. “It’s a bit less than five hundred meters straight-line, I think, but the height should shield us from blast and debris.”
Busick was nodding as they approached the rest of the group, and Ash saw Kenner, the corpsman, looking at them imploringly, as if his commander could do something about the weather.
“We’re moving out,” Busick told them, indicating the hill Ash had picked. “Ms. Fontenot, can you and Singh carry Private Caminero? We need to get that hill between us and the blast area within the next twenty minutes.”
“Hold this for me,” Fontenot told Ash, shoving a Gauss rifle at him. She’d still been carrying two of the weapons since covering them all on their descent down the stairwell to the tunnels.
Ash hefted the weight of the thing, trying to get used to the feel of it. He’d gone through a familiarization course with it in the Academy and that was the last time he’d fired one.
I’m a pilot, he thought for maybe the thousandth time since all this had started. How the hell do I keep winding up as ground troops?
“I’ll take point,” Busick declared. “If you wouldn’t mind watching our backs, Ash.”
He shot her a thumbs-up, teeth beginning to chatter as standing in one place for too long allowed the cold to begin traveling up from the ground through his boots. He was even looking forward to the climb, since it would bring up his core temperature…as long as he didn’t start sweating. That might be fatal out here.
He thought he heard Busick transmitting something to Kamara and Weaver over her ‘link pickup and he guessed she was telling them where they were headed. He peered out into the depression where the massive crater had been eons ago and saw two indistinct figures in the perpetual dusk, bent over another smoking hole in the ice and snow about fifty meters from the first one.
When he looked back, he saw that Busick and the others were already moving out, quicker than he’d thought, and he had to jog to keep up.
***
The trek back through the tunnels and up the ladder had taken her much, much longer than the reverse route had, only hours before. Her injuries were being repaired, but the damage to her shoulder joint slowed her ascent; she’d had to be careful of a slip that could undo the progress the gel had made with an impact on the cement floor below. Now, finally, she pushed open the hatch and stepped through into the wind-swept night.
Snow had powdered the ground since she had last come this way, but the clouds had blown over with the north wind, and the sky offered a clear view of the planet around which this moon orbited, uninteresting to her as it harbored no life and thus offered no targets. She knew the other humans had passed through before her; she could still sense the chemical traces they’d left behind. One had been wounded by her hand, and the blood left a particular scent, sweet and somehow addictive. That one would slow them down, and perhaps she could still catch them before they reached whatever ship they intended to use to leave this place. The ship would take her home, back to that blue water and green hillside, where all those kind, smiling people lived.
She would kill them all. She would tear their civilization down around them and drink in their screams as they died, she would…
There. The footprints in the fresh snow led off that direction. It surprised her; she’d expected that they would run for the shuttle, but instead they were moving away from it, toward the foothills. She tested her limbs and felt a resurgence of energy; the repairs were nearly complete now, her full mobility restored. She loped with long, bounding strides, eating up meters with each step. On this ground, the humans were only minutes ahead of her.
Featureless, snow-covered plain blurred into lichen-encrusted calcite and thermal pools belching steam into the night sky, then turned seamlessly into low, rolling hills. Snow and soil and strands of lichen and the powdery remains of weathered rock exploded from under her clawed feet and one bit of ground was much like another. She followed the tracks when there were tracks, followed the scent when there were none, and three kilometers flashed by with no real sense of the passage of time.
And suddenly she knew exactly where she was, as if there was a homing beacon somewhere in her brain that had led her back to the place. The hills squatted around the hollow bowl shape, and part of her that was much older than Ophelia Dimas recognized where the womb had impacted this barren place, back when she’d had a real purpose, back when they had been here.
They had infested the galaxy with their version of life, with what they considered their mission. They’d spread their sin from one end to the other, building their cities and their zoos and their preserves and tampering with the very fabric of the universe in their hubris. Their stain still infected this place, this nearly perfect place. Their insidious, cancerous growth made its atmosphere and encouraged it to wear itself down with each cycle of growth, and made it a place where the humans could live.
The humans were nearly as bad as the ones they called “the Predecessors.” Their arrogant pride forced them to tamper with things they would have been wise to let be, things like the womb. The womb was below, nearly directly below, and part of her that had the capacity for curiosity wondered why they would come here. The rest of her, the part that only felt the need to destroy what the Predecessors had built, to destroy their progeny, saw the two men walking across the snow-covered depression, white spray stretching out with each step, and wanted to go rip them apart.
Wait, the part of her that had once been human cautioned. Wait for their ship to come. Wait and seize it when it lands.
No.
The balance shifted so abruptly that the hybrid nearly tumbled off her feet, staying upright mostly through momentum. The human part of her had been st
ruggling for control with the drone programming since the very beginning, and even more since she’d awoken aboard the Metaurus. She’d been fighting the drone’s need with needs of her own, with the desire to find a working ship and go home, and the fight was over, it was lost.
She was no longer a she, she was an it, a drone warrior and no longer even partially human. It had no fear, had no pain, had nothing but need, and what it needed now was to kill those two humans. Its jaw worked again, and the teeth began chittering as it ran at them.
***
Ash was trying to walk backwards, uphill, in the dark, through the snow without falling over when he heard the jets screaming by high overhead.
“It’s Sandi,” he yelled, head whipping around, looking for the Acheron.
The others were about twenty meters farther up the hill and he thought he saw them pause at his shout, but his focus was on finding the ship. He glanced back the way they’d come, downhill toward the hollow, thinking she might fly in from that direction. He almost missed the black blur, moving along the crest of the hill faster than any human ever could, would have missed it if a patch of fresh snow hadn’t reflected the light from the gas giant just right.
It was the hybrid, he knew it in his gut.
“Korri!” he yelled, remembering to touch his ‘link so she would hear him above the roar of the wind. “It’s going for Kamara and Weaver!”
He took off running, knowing he would never make it in time, unsure if he could even hit anything with a rifle he he’d fired once, ten years ago, but unable to do anything else. He had made it just a few meters when Fontenot blew past him, her bionics churning ground faster than he ever could.
“Gunny,” he tried Kamara’s helmet radio. “Gunny, can you hear me?”
Nothing. He didn’t know if he had the right frequency, didn’t know if the Gunny’s helmet had taken damage, but there was no answer and he didn’t have the breath to keep yelling. He tried to keep an eye on Kamara and Weaver, but the trail down the hill went into a dip and he lost sight of them and the creature. Then he was back up on top and could see the thing, could see it closing on the two men and Fontenot closing with it, and he knew she wouldn’t be fast enough.
Fontenot slowed just slightly and he saw the creature break stride, jerking to its right, and he could guess that the cyborg had fired her Gauss rifle. The hybrid didn’t stop, though, barely slowed. It was closer to them than she was, just too close to stop it in time, and she couldn’t shoot again without hitting the others. Kamara had seen it, but it took him precious seconds to bring his rifle around; he was too late.
The thing hit Weaver, slicing into his chest with a single, devastating slash and the Chief went flying, spinning away, and Ash felt as if he’d been punched in the gut. The old man was dead, just like that, in half a second. Ash was less than a hundred meters away now, and of all of them, he was the only with a clear shot. He threw the rifle to his shoulder, using the manual aiming reticle in its optical sight, and started firing even before he had the thing targeted.
Miraculously, he hit it square in the chest and it stumbled backwards, giving Kamara just enough time to get off a shot. Tungsten slugs the size of a man’s little finger tore into the thing, and it lunged towards the source of them, towards the nearest target, the Gunny. Fontenot risked a shot from behind it, even though it was directly in line with Kamara, but the hybrid ignored the impacts on its heavy back armor and swung a wild backhand at the Marine. Its claw tore the rifle from his hands and sent him sprawling three meters away, tumbling head over heels.
Ash wanted to shoot again, but Fontenot was moving into his line of fire and he cursed, running toward where Kamara had gone down instead. The hybrid was taking rounds from Fontenot, some of them penetrating its chitin, but one gun wasn’t enough to bring it down, and it plodded toward her, advancing with two-meter-long strides. He could hear the insane chittering now, though the light was too dim and he was too far away to see the jaws working.
It was going to get her, Ash knew it, and he was too far away and at the wrong angle to do anything about it. He knew in his gut that this was it, that Fontenot was going to die, and he and Kamara would follow soon after, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. He was torn in just an instant between trying to help Kamara and throwing himself at the hybrid to try to save Fontenot, knowing that either action was pointless.
His chest rumbled with the roar that filled the night, and glaring light played across all of them, blinding and yet revealing every obscene detail of the hybrid, every unnatural melding of human and alien. The thing turned away from Fontenot, looking upward, and so did Ash, unable to help himself. It was the Acheron, hovering on columns of superheated air only thirty meters above them, so incredibly huge, like a mountain hanging over their heads, looking so much larger than it did from the inside. Its landing lights glared down at the creature, harsh and accusatory.
The hybrid screamed. Ash hadn’t thought it could make that sound, that it could make any sound except the mindless chittering, but it screamed, a ululating howl that pierced even the bellow of the cutter’s engines. The thing tried to leap at the ship, clawing at air, and came much closer than Ash thought it would. It was still on its upward arc when the proton cannon fired.
Ash wasn’t looking directly at it, which was the only reason he wasn’t completely blinded. The blast of charged particles ripped apart the night with the harnessed energy of a fusion reactor, ripped apart the very fabric of reality; and the hybrid ceased to exist, finally, vaporized in the coherent heat of the heart of a star.
The concussion slammed Ash to the ground, the superheated air sucking the breath from his lungs and searing his skin like the worst sunburn of his life. Afterimages danced over his vision, and he barely retained consciousness. And the one thing that remained in his battered brain, the one coherent thought that cut through the haze was: The bombs.
Something grabbed him by the arm and he saw Fontenot’s face swimming through a kaleidoscope of light and haze and smoke. She hauled him to his feet and pushed him ahead of her, and somehow he was able to run, stumbling blindly, digging in with his toes, pushing himself up the hill. They had seconds, he was sure of it, seconds until the timers…
The charges blew and the world exploded with them. Ash was rolling downward, ears filled with a shrill whistle, brain weighed down with tons of soil, the pain a hammer that had slammed into his body, a shoe dropping from the sky to pound him flat. He was tumbling, out of control, clawing at dirt and rock and feeling it collapse under his fingers, feeling the vibration through the very ground that he knew was the Pit collapsing in on itself.
He would be buried along with the ancient secrets here, a mystery of his own to be discovered by travelers in some distant eon and puzzled over.
Did this strange, fossilized alien create the hive? Was he one of the ancient ones who settled this world and built these strange ruins?
He might have laughed if he’d had the breath or time.
He was falling and he knew it was the last fall, the one that would end with him lying broken under thousands of tons of rubble, and then his hands finally caught something, something hard and unyielding that gouged at his fingers. He reveled in the pain and lunged toward it, grabbing with both hands.
He was, he realized as he blinked dust and dirt out of his face, clinging at the jagged end of a BiPhase Carbide support rib, stronger than the rock and dirt that had collapsed around it and extending back all the way into the side of the hill. Part of it had been twisted away by the incredible weight it had tried to support, and what was left was cutting into his hands; he could feel the blood welling up and he knew he wouldn’t be able to hold on long. He tried to kick his legs upward to lock them onto the thing, but the pain was too great and he nearly let go.
He had seconds before his fingers gave out and he knew it.
“Sandi,” he croaked, wishing he could talk to her one more time.
“No, just me.”
“What a perfectly poetic way for both of us to die,” Singh declared, his voice clear and ringing above the rumble of the collapsing rock and dirt, his natural and cybernetic eyes visible even through the clouds of smoke and dust. “It would be so easy, just to let everything end.”
With a slight grunt of effort, he lifted Ash up and threw him over his shoulder. Ash felt mildly nauseous from the violent motion, and he wheezed painfully as the cyborg’s metal shoulder jammed into his gut. But they didn’t fall, and wavering, unsteady metal gave way to crumbling rock and dirt, and then to solid ground, and Singh tossed him to the ground, Ash’s shoulders smacking hard against the cold and unyielding dirt.
“I’m afraid neither of us gets off quite that easy.” Singh laughed, the sound nearly as strange and alien as the hybrid’s chittering. “People like us never do.”
Chapter Eighteen
Captain Richard Fox turned the crystalline data spike over and over in his fingers, regarding it as one might an ancient jewel pried from some golden idol. The morning light glinted off of it enticingly, reflecting polychromatic flares onto the café’s white, plastic tables.
“No survivors, huh?” Fox repeated, closing his fist over the spike, then tucking it away in a shirt pocket. The shirt was bright red, decorated in purple sun-flowers and worn untucked over baggy shorts. “That’s a shame.”