“Go get some water and food. I’ll stay here and watch the cams.”
Jason needed something to do, something to focus on to take his mind off Mitch’s death and his feeling of guilt.
O’Neil was right to doubt me. I put my feelings for Riley first, and Mitch was the victim of my rash decisions.
A food dispenser provided him with two bottles of water and two packs of rations. He returned to the control room, carrying his bounty.
“Not exactly what I call a feast, but it’ll do,” he said, tossing a pack and a bottle to Riley.
She caught them easily, unwrapped the pack, and started chewing. Jason opened a bottle of water and avidly gulped its contents.
“Now that we have time, what did you want to tell me when I rescued you?” Jason prompted.
Riley stared at her bottle of water. If she was still in pain due to her injury, she hid it well. “I don’t recall.”
“C’mon, you’ve always been a lousy liar, Riley,” Jason pressed her. “I know it was something important. You couldn’t have forgotten.”
She shook her head. “We must focus on the mission. Forget the rest.”
“Coward.”
She darted a sharp look at him. He liked her even when she was angry. However, he saw no anger in her eyes. Not this time.
“No quip, no repartee, no snappy remark? I barely recognize you, Riley. What happened to your fighting spirit?”
“You were right,” she said blankly. “When I came to visit you at the hospital. You said I cared about you. You were right. Satisfied?”
Jason shrugged. “I already knew that. Tell me something I don’t know. Tell me about yourself. We’ve been serving together for years, but I still don’t know what your hobbies are. You must have hobbies, right, beside reading tactical manuals?”
“Not really. Reading, action sims on occasion. What about you?”
“You already know all my bad habits,” he replied with a snigger. “I enjoy star poker, beer, and spice on occasion. Just a whiff to relax a bit. I’m also a sucker for action holo-vids and sims, like all males my age, I guess.”
Riley smirked, looking at him from the corner of her eye. “You left quite a few bad habits off your list. What about dangerous sports and compulsive risk taking? What about womanizing?”
He spread his arms. “You’re exaggerating. Compulsive risk taking? Womanizing? It’s all relative. Don’t tell me you’re a saint, and no kinky fantasy ever ventured into that pretty head of yours. Let me guess—your fantasy is…domination.”
She choked and coughed to clear her throat. “What? Why? Why would you think that?”
His eyes rolled up, while a knowing smile tugged at the corners of his lips. “Dunno, just a guess. With your strength and all, don’t you enjoy dominating men? Or maybe it’s the contrary—you fantasize about being a victim. A damsel in distress.”
“You and your twisted mind…”
“I—”
Suddenly she raised her hand to hush him and focused her attention on one of the screens. “We’ve got company. A black squad.”
He chewed his energy bar, squinting at the screen. “Whatta they doin’?”
“I think they’ve detected the outpost. They’re moving straight toward the underground entrance. I’m activating auto-turrets. We’ll give them a warm welcome.”
*****
Shivering, Adrian turned to face his abductor. Subject Nine was so close his forward horn rasped against Adrian’s helmet. Two claws dripping with blood moved toward Adrian’s throat.
“I can help you,” Adrian said quickly in Taar’kuun. “You need me; otherwise you would’ve killed me already.”
The claws froze. Nine’s orange eyes stared at him through his mask. Adrian held his breath, wondering if the creature would be willing to communicate.
A red beam pierced the dark and struck Nine in the eyes. He recoiled with a roar.
Adrian crawled away from the hybrid. His shaking hand grabbed his blaster, but the vent was so narrow he didn’t have enough space to draw it.
A strong arm grabbed him by the leg and pulled him out of the air vent. It was Mortensen, and he was armed with the laser the scientists had designed.
From the corner of his eye, Adrian glimpsed a ghostly form pouncing on him. Mortensen reacted with lightning speed. Without letting go of Adrian, he pointed the laser at the attacker, and a red beam flashed again. The hybrid screeched, and his claws missed Mortensen, slashing the wall.
The sergeant eased Adrian on the floor, protecting him with his massive body. Still holding the laser in one hand, he drew his sidearm and fired at the hybrid pointblank. The blaster bolt hit the creature’s neck, and the resulting explosion projected shreds of body armor and bits of flesh onto the wall.
“I’ll protect Darus,” Okoro shouted to the sergeant. “Finish them off!”
Mortensen nodded and aimed at the injured hybrid, whom Adrian identified as Subject Seven. He squeezed the trigger, but nothing happened. His blaster must have been damaged by corrosive substances that spurted from the hybrid’s biosuit.
Another hybrid—Subject Six—charged Mortensen. Okoro and her marines fired, but the hybrid was too fast. He hit Mortensen’s left arm, deliberately sending the laser flying into the tank of molten alloy. The sergeant engaged in hand-to-hand combat.
Okoro ordered all surviving marines to form a wall around Adrian. They aimed their rifles at Seven. The injured hybrid tried to bolt, but she hadn’t recovered her sight and her forehead hit a mechanical arm. The marines unleashed a squall of blaster fire and ripped her biosuit to shreds. Two seconds later, nothing remained of her but a pile of burned flesh mingling with shreds of body armor.
Mortensen was still wrestling with Six. The hybrid screeched in rage, frustrated by the inability to outmatch his opponent’s strength. He thrust his horn forward, trying to break Mortensen’s helmet. Okoro and the marines aimed at Six, but held their fire; they couldn’t risk hitting the sergeant.
He grabbed the hybrid by the throat with one hand and drew an auto-sharpening stick with the other. This crude weapon was highly unusual for a marine, and Adrian supposed Mortensen had crafted it himself. He drove the stick into Six’s biosuit, targeting the hybrid’s aortic arch.
Six grabbed the stick to remove it, but Mortensen clutched it with both hands and lifted the hybrid off the ground. Six roared and thrashed about, helplessly suspended in the air. Purple blood squirted from his wound.
“Burn in hell,” Mortensen yelled, throwing his opponent into the tank filled with molten alloy.
Six tried to get out of the tank, his claws screeching and rasping against the nanoalloy wall. The lower part of his body was already submerging. He cried and thrashed his arms, sending geysers of melted alloy in all directions.
Six’s hands still moved when his head disappeared in the pool of metal. Adrian watched him die with mixed feelings of relief and pity.
Mortensen examined the gashes in his body armor.
“Need medical attention, sarge?” Okoro asked him.
“I’m fine. Now let’s go grab the pack leader and fry him too.”
Adrian shook his head. “We must find Prof. Tenev, if he’s still alive. Let me watch the last video-log entry. Maybe it’ll give us a clue as to his whereabouts.”
“Knock yourself out, doctor,” Okoro agreed. “But please get away from the air vents. We’ll form a defensive perimeter around you.”
Adrian set his nanocomputer on a table in the middle of the underground room. The surviving marines formed a circle around him. He selected the last entry and hit play.
Tenev’s hologram appeared above the table. “What I’ve just seen…” He stared at the cam with wide eyes, rocking his head. “By all the stars in the galaxy… How could I have been so wrong? I could hardly believe my eyes. When Subject Five died of her injuries, at first, the other hybrids didn’t know what to do. They put her corpse on a table and just paced around it like feral beasts. Then Nine di
sappeared and returned a minute later with a mnemonic imprint device.”
The scientist coughed, and his hologram vanished. Then the recording continued. “Nine struggled to handle the device due to the changing morphology of his hands. He also had to adjust the helmet quite a bit to fit it on his head, but he succeeded. He activated the device, closed his eyes for a minute, and when he opened them again, his expression changed. He removed the helmet, went to the corpse, raised his arms, and started…singing.”
Tenev took a deep breath before resuming, “I have no words to describe this. It wasn’t singing in the human sense, of course. A sort of Jotnar chanting, guttural, haunting. Then he performed a ritual. I won’t describe it in detail, as I recorded the whole scene and, if anyone is watching, you can find it in my personal databank. The point is…”
He paused again, rubbing his chin, a furrow creasing his forehead. “I was moved. It’s not easy for a career scientist to admit, but I was moved by that funeral ritual. For the Jotnar, it was more than a formality. I sensed their pain, the grief for their lost companion. They clearly experience complex emotions.
“As I watched, I realized we’ve misjudged the Jotnar. We saw them as warlike brutes, primitive and uncivilized. We saw them as savages driven by base instincts, the embodiment of violence, ignorance, and lust, like the creatures from our ancestor’s folklore.
“I still don’t understand how Nine knew the details of the ritual. Maybe he pieced together the archeological information downloaded into his brain from our databanks. At any rate, it’s obvious the Jotnar had a culture and a system of beliefs, probably more complex than we imagined, even though they had no written language.
“We saw the Jotnar only as weapons, and in that we were no better than the Taar’kuun. We could’ve resurrected their species. Instead we turned them into monsters. We let them down. But I can still correct this mistake.”
The video-log ended.
“What now?” Okoro asked.
“I think I know where the professor went,” Adrian said. “According to the layout schematic, there’s a level-ten security lab in Section Gamma. We haven’t explored it as it’s sealed, separated from the rest of the facility by a stasis field.”
“Why would he go there? Wasn’t he safer in his office, protected by auto-turrets?”
Adrian shook his head. “At this point, Tenev isn’t animated by survival instinct, but by guilt.”
“You think he’s still alive?”
“Only one way to find out. We must get to that top-security lab.”
*****
The black squad charged the outpost. The auto-turret defending the underground entrance opened fire, but the trooper’s blaster-resistant shields stopped the bolts. Riley took manual control of the turret and shot an anti-personnel rocket. It hit the ground, and Jason thought Riley had missed.
She hadn’t. The shockwave hurled the troopers backward and disrupted their formation. The blasters whirred again and peppered them with armor-piercing bolts. Two of them didn’t get up.
The others recovered quickly and unleashed their plasma rifles at the turret. The screen filled with static.
“Two down, six to go,” Riley said, dashing out of the control room.
Jason donned his helmet and followed her to the shaft leading to the lower level. Riley shot the control panel of the elevator to disable it. Now the Taar’kuun would have to take the stairs. She positioned herself to have a clear line of fire on the entrance below and aimed her carbine. Jason drew his Wells-9.
Her eyes darted at him. “Seriously? Don’t you want to use a real man’s weapon?”
He frowned. “Hey, what d’you have against the niner? It’s a solid blaster, very reliable and all.”
She drew her sidearm and shoved it into his hand. “Against the black squads, you need something with higher stopping power. They’re resilient as hell. A twelver is the way to go.”
Jason holstered his Wells-9 and squeezed its heavier cousin with both hands. The blaster was heavy indeed, due to its hyper-dense cyclotron plasma generator.
The troopers didn’t use explosives, plasma, or laser torches to get through the entrance door. Jason heard the characteristic hissing noise from a biosynthetic corrosive bomb. He sensed its pungent stench even through the filters of his helmet.
The hole in the door grew wider as the corrosive substance chewed through the nanoalloy. A cloud of green smoke billowed into the stairwell, pushed by the wind.
“They’ll send bots first,” Riley told Jason. “Switch to rapid fire and shoot them as quickly as possible.”
He selected the rapid-fire mode of his Wells-12 and aimed at the entrance. As Riley had predicted, bots the size of a frisbee dashed through the smoke. Her blaster rattled, disintegrating the bots. Her accuracy seemed unaffected by the smoke.
The first two troopers who appeared down the stairs protected themselves with shields. One of them had a missile launcher in the other hand.
There was a flash and a bang. The shockwave hit Jason in the chest and toppled him to the floor. The world went soundless for a few seconds.
“What the…” He could barely hear his own voice.
Silence gave way to a nerve-wrenching buzzing. He scrambled to his feet and strived to regain balance as the corridor wobbled around him. Only his pilot training saved him from the effects of vertigo. He fired in the staircase without aiming.
Riley pushed him toward the exit on the upper level. “We have to evac.”
Only now he understood what had happened. The trooper had fired an anti-personnel missile, and Riley shot it in flight. The explosion probably took a couple of troopers out of action, but the rest were charging.
Jason ran behind her, wondering what she had in mind. “We can’t go outside.”
She took cover as they turned a corner. “We have to. We can’t defend the outpost. Another squad is coming in reinforcement. I initiated self-destruct.”
“But this outpost doesn’t have a self-destruct.”
“I overloaded the generator. Same effect.” Her blaster boomed at the pursuers. Jason heard a trooper screech and hit the floor.
“But—”
“The storm is subsiding. The conditions on the surface should be survivable.”
When Jason unlocked and opened the door, the blizzard hit him with such force he almost lost balance. “Survivable?” he asked doubtfully.
“We stay—we’re dead,” Riley shouted, unleashing another salvo.
Jason sighed and staggered through the door. The storm was still raging, but the worst was over. The sky started to clear, and he could glimpse the planet’s moon through the clouds. He plowed through the snow, leaning forward to lower his center of gravity.
Riley shut the door behind her and fired at the control panel. “Run!”
“Easy to say! What d’you think I’m doing?” He plowed through a meter of snow, panting.
“Need to go faster,” Riley urged. “This way.”
She grabbed Jason and tossed him with such force he felt like he was flying. The thought of activating his thrust pack crossed his mind, but he rejected that idea, as the wind was still too strong.
He landed on a steep slope, got his feet under him, and started sliding down. The ragged surface of the glacier drew fantastical shapes: curved pillars, asymmetrical arches, hanging sheets of ice spread like the wings of a dragon. Jason slalomed between them, going faster and faster.
The adrenaline junkie in him was having the ride of his life. The reasonable part of him screamed in terror.
The glacier rumbled. He glanced over his shoulder; a mushroom of fire and smoke rose from the outpost.
“Stay focused, dammit!” Riley yelled, skating beside him.
Jason was racing straight at a large block of ice. He had no time to avoid it. He fired the thrust pack and soared.
A gale hurled him upward. He had as much control over his flight as a dead leaf in a storm.
The ground was moving away al
armingly fast. Jason squeezed the control stick of his flight pack with one hand, and the Wells-12 in the other. He spotted two dark figures taking position. Taar’kuun troopers. Riley was still sliding down the slope, unaware of their presence.
“Watch your six!” he shouted, but he wasn’t sure she heard him.
The ascending air current weakened, and he managed to regain control of his flight. He swooped upon the troopers. They were aiming at Riley. He set the blaster on full power, fired, and hit the first trooper in the shoulder. The rifle of the other one flashed twice.
“Take cover!” he yelled to Riley.
He aimed at the second trooper and—as soon as the energy bar of his weapon returned to one hundred percent—squeezed the trigger. His bolt missed the target and hit the snow. The trooper threw himself to the side, rolled, and raised the barrel of his rifle. Jason wouldn’t give him time to take aim.
He fired again. The trooper collapsed.
“Yes! Damn, I’m good! Riley, have you seen that?” Jason’s eyes searched for her and found her lying at the foot of the glacier.
His pulse hammering in his ears, he swooped down. As his feet touched the ice, he activated the adhesive coating of his boots and dashed to her. A billow of smoke was rising from a hole in her helmet.
He kneeled and examined her wound. The plasma bolt had punched through her helmet and burned the left side of her head. It didn’t penetrate the skull, but Jason knew that even superficial plasma burns were often fatal, as plasma bolts inflicted deadly electroshocks.
“Riley, can you hear me?”
She was unresponsive. He examined her with a medical scanner, struggling to focus as a panic attack distorted his perceptions. After a few seconds that lasted an eternity, the device rendered its verdict.
Riley was dead.
Jason’s eyes dashed around for shelter. A rock outcrop was the best he could find. He carried Riley there and eased her gently on the ground. Then he fumbled in his backpack, searching for survival equipment. He didn’t have a forcefield generator, only a small portable heater and a “smart” tent.
Survival Strategy Page 15