by Tim Marquitz
“By always you mean never,” said Theo, who faced the grill, where a burger sizzled next to simmering onions. “You always said we were gonna die, but did we?”
Marian shook her head in the way of people who’ve been married too long, that eye-rolling reaction that says you’re such an old fool, I won’t even bother to argue.
“Just because we didn’t, plenty of us did,” she said.
Kyle raised his bottle of Asahi. “I’ll drink to that. And to them.”
Marian fast-wiped the spot where his beer had been, then raised her glass of water and clinked a toast. She hadn’t had a drop of alcohol in a decade.
Three decades earlier, Marian had been his navigator. Theo, the rear gunner, or “ass-man” as the position was called. Marian had been fine after the war, or so Kyle had thought. Behind closed doors, though, she’d been boozing it up like a pro. He’d been part of the intervention.
Everyone copes in a different way.
“The Squids are as good as dead,” Theo said, flipping the burger in a hissing cloud of grease. “Those Demon-class mechs? They’re the real deal. I heard tell there’s even a few new E-Classers in the attack force.”
Marian snatched Kyle’s still-full plate, wiped under it, set it back down.
“And you know that because all the big brass stop in here to tell an old ass-man about secret war plans?”
Theo leaned away from the stove, used his spatula to thwap Marian’s ample behind. Without missing a beat, her wash-rag snaked out whip fast and hit Theo’s just-as-ample butt with a sharp crack.
Theo twitched. Laughing, he moved the onions around the grill.
Kyle ate at the diner three, maybe four times a week. You can’t see the gradual changes in people when you see them that often. Once in a while, however, mostly whenever the couple moved with any kind of speed, he’d have that shearing here-now/there-then image of what they’d been like back in the day. Marian and Theo had been fitness-obsessed. They would have contests to see who could do the most sit-ups—loser had to buy the drinks.
That changed when Marian got the Amber Crawl. Under that glove and her sleeve, iridescent amber lines traced her skin like malicious lightning, steadily reaching up her arm. Last Kyle had heard, the tips of the lines had reached her shoulder. The Crawl was slow, but inexorable. Marian had maybe three or four more years. Once it reached the brain, that was it; she would die… screaming. If she lived that long, of course, which she would not. Theo would see to it. A choice between going out as a babbling madwoman or taking a bullet? Marian chose the latter.
She could have had the arm amputated, but refused. Sometimes that worked, most times not. Most times the Crawl would appear somewhere else on the victim’s body; then, it was a limb amputated for nothing. Marian preferred to dance with the devil she knew.
She wasn’t the only beastie with Amber Crawl. Many had died already, wasting away from the incurable, lingering disease. A disease caught from contact with the Squids. In all the horrors Kyle had seen in the war, on Mars or in orbit around it, the worst had come when the Squids had breached Fang’s hull. Breached and boarded. Susan Kwan, the reliable flight engineer, had died that day. Theo would have died, too, if not for Marian, who tackled one of the aliens to save her man. Such a brutal bit of battle. Inside the most-powerful, highest-tech war machine ever made, survival came down to primitive hand-to-hand combat.
The VA could do nothing to help Marian. No one could. The VA might have tried a little harder, but why bother? Her service days were gone. When she died, that was one less payment. Why properly fund the VA when the money was needed for the C-Class, the D-Class, and the rumored E-Class?
That was the new military: machines mattered, people not so much.
The good-looking newsman came back on.
“Volume up,” Marian said. She moved down the counter, wiping beneath the plates of other patrons who were also still eating. Some people seemed surprised by this. Not the regulars, though. They knew Marian never stopped fidgeting and didn’t let it slow their meal down one bit.
“The Council President said her confidence is high that we will persevere,” the anchor said. “Orbital observation confirmed that the Venus nest is at least three months from sporification. The attack force should wipe them out long before then.”
Sporification. One of Kyle’s least-favorite words, along with moist. Oh, and also castration. Just the sound of that word gave him the shivers.
The Squids, the only other known sentient species, were vastly different from humanity. From anything on Earth, really. Most often they presented as amorphous individuals, maybe fifty kilos, no fixed shape. People at first called them amoebas, but for some reason that name hadn’t stuck. The lack of a fixed shape was shocking, but not as disturbing as what they could do with it—the squids could combine. Two could become one, as could three, four, and so on. The number seemed limitless. On Mars, Kyle had seen thousands of them fuse together into literal giants that fought the Beasts head-on.
The Squids were a colonial organism. Despite the war, humanity still knew little about its enemy. What was known, however, was the way the species reproduced on the grand scale. Teeming masses of the things would combine into something that looked like a living, wiggling, shimmering bubble. Inside that bubble, they grew what could only be thought of as a spore cannon, a biological monstrosity capable of launching dense seedlings into orbit. The seedlings would spread out and land on any planet. No one knew how, when, or why the Squids arrived on Mars, but the Beast flotilla had landed there before the species could sporify and shoot seedlings toward Earth.
“Fuckers,” Theo said as he finished assembling the Swiss and onions burger. “So much for wiping them out. You’d think the dickless shit-hat squints could have detected the bastards on Venus. It’s like we fought and died for nothing.”
Theo slapped a little bell next to the grill. All he had to do was pick up the plate, turn and put it on the counter, but that wasn’t how he and Marian did things. She swept behind him, sliding through the narrow space between his big butt and the counter, grabbed the plate, and placed it in front of the customer.
“There ya go, hon,” she said.
Before the customer could get at the burger, she lifted the plate, wiped under it, set it back down again.
The anchor’s voice drew everyone’s attention.
“We’re getting our first visuals back. I remind you, this feed is live, and BNS can’t guarantee the visuals won’t trigger individuals susceptible to images of violence, war, blood, dismemberment, or foul language.”
The clinks of knives and forks faded to silence. Everyone in the diner looked to the projection. Thirty years without war, the longest peace in Earth’s entire history. A peace brought about because the entire planet had unified to fight an alien menace, a menace thought to be extinct—correction, thought to have been exterminated—only to be discovered alive and well on Venus.
And now the battle would begin again.
Or had begun, considering the eight to ten-minute signal lag from Venus to Earth.
On the display, the first images appeared.
A C-Class. Six-limbed, like the Beasts. It hung there in the blackness of space. No thruster fire. No movement at all save for a slow rotation, inertia carrying it in a forever-spin.
“Something’s wrong,” Marian said.
Kyle saw no marks on the C-Class, no visible damage. Catastrophic life-support malfunction? But if so, the machine itself should still be moving, acting, doing something. As it rotated around, he saw a buxom blonde painted on the left thigh. Below the girl, in script blue letters, the words “Carol’s Crush.”
The image blinked out, replaced by another. D-Class. Four limbs, two arms and two legs. Huge machines, twice the size of a Beast.
Like the C-Class, it was unmoving.
“That’s Ming’s Raider,” Theo said.
The man had finally turned from the grill to watch the monitor. Only now could Kyle see the burn scars that cover
ed the left side of Theo’s face. Kyle had been the one to put out the fire that had engulfed Theo. The screams, the smell of burnt flesh, of fire-extinguisher gas, things that sometimes still woke Kyle out of a stone-cold sleep.
“What the hell is going on,” someone asked. Maybe a regular. Kyle didn’t recognize him.
“Both of those units appear to be out of commission,” the anchor said. “We’re waiting for more information, all we have for now are the visuals.”
The screen changed again. This time, a wide-angle. In the background, the yellow-brown curve of Venus. In the foreground, floating, unmoving mechs. Hundreds of them. No lights. No thrusters. No nothing.
“Jesus Christ,” Theo said. “They’re all gone.”
Another angle: a carrier. Lights on this one, lights and thrusters and all guns blazing toward some unseen enemy. And at the edge of the display, a sight that almost made Kyle shit his pants—Squid ships. Tiny, distant, but coming closer. A swarm of them, a swarm that looked like the ones he and his crew had faced so long ago.
Marian covered her mouth with the wet rag.
“Oh, Lord,” she said. “Oh, Lord.”
Kyle closed his eyes. He couldn’t watch anymore.
“We…uh…we don’t know what we’re seeing, if this is some kind of signal glitch, or a strategy…um…”
The terror in the man’s voice, Kyle shared the feeling. Thirty years out of the service, sure, but he wasn’t some dumb-ass civilian. The Squids had hit the invasion force with something new.
Eyes still closed, Kyle heard the display start to broadcast snippets of communication from the carrier and from escort fighters. Unlike the C-Class and up, those were operated by people. From the sound of things, they were working, at least well enough to put up a fight. Judging from the panicked voices and the screams, a fight that wouldn’t last long.
The sounds made images of battles-past flash through Kyle’s thoughts. All the blood, the dead friends, the people he hadn’t been able to save.
He felt the food in his belly rising.
Kyle stood and quickly exited the diner. He made it two steps out of the door before the flashbacks had him puking the now less-than-perfect Cubano on the sidewalk.
He looked around, expecting some kind person to be coming his way, to see if he was all right, but the streets were empty. Not a soul. Not even the homeless that seemed to always be around. Everyone in San Diego was pinned to their holos.
Not just San Diego. The planet.
A subtle flashing in his left eye. Who would be calling now? He blinked twice to get the caller ID.
SHANDA DAHLQUIST-BANKS.
His daughter.
Kyle blinked four times, answering the call in full. The image of his daughter filled his vision, the sound of her voice filled his ears.
“Captain Dahlquist,” she said.
Her voice created an instant whirlwind of emotions. Love, first and foremost. She was his only child. With that love came feelings of anger and betrayal. In the divorce, Shanda had sided with her mother. Kyle still didn’t know why. He was the one who’d been cheated on.
And, the final feeling: guilt.
Guilt that his own daughter was largely responsible for so many of his fellow beasties being phased out of the military. Shanda was in the MCSD, the military computer science division. She’d been a big part of C-Class Project, and then one of the lead engineers for D-Class.
His own daughter was the reason people like Theo, Miriam, and others had been retired. She was the reason Lady worked on the docks. And the reason why Fang worked, well, Kyle couldn’t think about that right now.
In the midst of this galaxy-sized clusterfuck, her calling him at that moment made no sense. He said as much. “Why are you calling me?”
No how do you do or hello, honey. Not for her. She’d always been a cold child. Distant, borderline emotionless.
“I’m calling because… I’m your new CO.”
She was in combat fatigues. Everyone wore fatigues now, even high-ups like her who would never see a minute of actual battle. Kyle scrunched his eyes, gave his head a little shake.
“My what?”
“Your CO,” she said again. “Dad, there’s no other way to say this, you’ve been called into active duty. You and every other crew member that served in B-Class.”
The horror of what he’d seen on the broadcast from Venus combined with her call suddenly hit home. “You’re activating the Beasts?”
“We have no choice.”
Kyle smelled his own vomit. He looked down. He’d got some on his shoes. What a waste. “Shanda, I’m fifty-four years old.”
“Aside from a few high-ranking Brass, there isn’t anyone in active duty who trained on the B-platform,” she said, and he detected the slightest tremor in her voice. For Shanda, that meant she was rattled. Bad.
“We’re gathering every Beast on the planet—functioning or not—and shipping out in forty-eight hours,” she said. “Ninety-one days to Venus. We must get there before sporification. You’ll be on the carrier to train the new crews.”
He listened to her words, and heard through them. She wasn’t his daughter at that moment, not really. She was Brass. He’d spent five years listening to the strange intricacies and hidden pathways of brass-speak, learning to hear the real through the gloss and rah-rah.
Like Marian, he now had a bad feeling about this.
“We trained every day for nine months to operate Fang,” he said. “The whole crew, even the gunners. Three months isn’t enough time to spin up.”
Shanda said nothing.
That was all the confirmation he needed. Sure, there would be trainees. Trainees who wouldn’t get a tenth of the cycle time needed for Kyle and his crew to shake off the rust. As insane as it sounded, he was being sent to war once again. “Shanda, maybe you didn’t hear me. Based on the lack of birthday cards, I’ll assume you have no idea your father is fifty-four fucking years old. You want to send an old man to war? Your old man?”
“You won’t be fighting. You’ll be—”
“Stop. You were always smarter than your mother and me, but you being smart doesn’t make me stupid. I’m not going. And I guarantee most of my crew won’t go.”
She paused. When she spoke again, it wasn’t with her commander’s voice. She sounded like his daughter again. The same daughter he hadn’t heard one word from in the past three years. “Dad, if you don’t go, we lose. We’re not sure exactly what happened, but the Squids spent the last thirty years building some kind of adaptive virus. It cripples AI. We lost every mech in the fleet.”
“What about reserves?”
Another pause.
“We committed ninety percent of our force to the attack, to make sure we scoured the planet and got them all. We’ve lost the reserves, as well. Estimates are we’re down to six percent.”
She didn’t have to go on.
“It won’t work,” Kyle said.
“I’ve seen the projections. What the news didn’t tell you is that there are multiple nests. When they sporify, we’re looking at thousands of seeds, Dad. Thousands. They will hit the Mars colonies first, then the lunar bases. And then us.
“The Squids have an invasion flotilla ready to escort them in. I don’t have time to answer questions, so let me break it down—if we don’t hit the nests before they sporify, best-case projections put us at ten months to extinction of the entire human race.”
He wanted to argue. He’d seen Squids firsthand, though. He’d seen the horror that was a Squid nest. Teeming, swirling masses of squidly-diddlies. He’d killed them in every way imaginable: bullets, bombs, missiles, and—more than anything else—with fire.
It was hard enough defeating the bastards with hundred-foot-tall mechs firing tactical nukes. Conventional weaponry wouldn’t stand much of a chance, and civilians? No chance at all.
“A chopper is en route to you,” Shanda said. “Break the news to Theo and Marian. Get them ready.”
At leas
t she had the courtesy not to call them by their ranks and last names. Once upon a time she’d called them Aunty and Uncle. That was before the falling out, before she joined the military as a goddamn girl genius.
“They aren’t fit to serve,” he said.
“Not your decision to make. They report. The whole crew does. That means Mom, too.”
He should have known that was coming. More shit shoveled onto the trash-fire.
“The Squids burned Creatures and Demons,” he said. “What about the Eradicators?”
“No point in keeping it secret anymore. E-Class is gone, too.”
“So, this virus or whatever took out the best you had,” Kyle said. “When we get to Venus, what’s to stop them from wiping out Fang, Lady in Red, and every damn Beast you send to be slaughtered?”
“Three months to Venus. Together, we’ll find a way.”
The way she said it. She might be estranged from him, yet he knew his little girl, could still read into the sound of her voice. And what he found there made his blood run cold.
“You’re going.”
“I have to.”
Rotor blades cut the air, distant but coming closer. The chopper. Coming for him and his friends.
His little girl was going to war.
He would not let her go alone.
“What if they say no?” he asked. “What if the Beasts don’t want to fight?”
“They will,” Shanda said, that simple statement the tinniest bit of grace. “Dad, I have to go now. I’ll see you soon.”
She blinked out.
Kyle stood there, staring at nothing. Three years without talking to his daughter or his wife, and now war would bring them all together. “One big happy family,” he said, then headed back into the diner as the sounds of the chopper grew louder.
Miramar Landfill stank. It stank bad.
Kyle, Marian, and Theo stood at the edge of the dump, on ground that was a compacted mash of dirt and garbage. Flies buzzed. Gulls screeched. The sun hadn’t set yet, its heat percolating the garbage, making the noxious odor rise in a humid, thick cloud. The three old friends stood and watched a giant wade through the garbage toward them.